An artist/photographer/geek named Max Lyons has been experimenting with incredibly-detailed hi-res pictures. The most interesting thing is that he takes these gigapixel images with an ordinary digital camera, not some wildly expensive professional gear.
He sets up a normal shot--- not necessarily a vast panorama, but a shot much like anyone might compose with a good camera. Then, he divides the overall shot into many smaller sub areas and shoots each tiny subarea at the camera's maximum resolution. When he's done, he has a set of high-resolution image tiles of the originally-composed shot.
He then uses stitching software to assemble the slew of image tiles into one seamless, ultra-high-resolution mosaic. The final image actually contains more detail than a human eye can see, and can full non-pixelated resolution even at incredible zoom-in ranges.
His page on "Breaking the gigapixel barrier" is at http://www.tawbaware.com/maxlyons/gigapixel.htm . There, you can see a much-reduced, low-res version of the gigapixel photo, along with an interesting commentary on his technique.
A modest gallery of his earlier work--- also mosaics, though not in the gigapixel range--- is at http://www.tawbaware.com/maxlyons/index.html
Amazing!
That's nice Fred, but that page has a date of 2003 on it. You would think someone would have beat him in the megapixels by now.
ReplyDeleteThe site was interesting to me, even if not posted yesterday.Whatthehell: This is a blog, not a news service. =)
ReplyDeleteI've played with some large format photos, myself, but nothing like a Gpx.
Here's a link to one large format photo I did. Try to view it at full res rather than shrunken-to-fit in your browser:
http://tinyurl.com/krudof