20+ incredible Gigapixel Photography Inspirations

The Metro carried an article (I tried to find) of an image of London, published by online publisher 360 Cities, with a resolution of 80 gigapixels (80 billion pixels) from 7,886 high-resolution images…..

The article below is in a similar vein…

http://www.smashingtips.com/gigapixel-photography-inspirations04. Feb, 2010

Gigapixel photography is a new trend that has come about in the last few years, creating 1,000+ megapixels of data in single images, cropped together to create a monstrous image. The detail and spectrum that can be captured in a Giga pixel image is unlike that of anything that a single camera can capture.
For taking Giga pixel Photography, you need to have a Gigapxl Camera. The Gigapxl camera captures single exposures on film with enough resolvable detail to support scanning at resolutions up to four billion pixels. Single-gigapixel images are slightly larger than 44,000 x 22,000 pixels in size and four-gigapixel images are twice as wide and twice as high at 88,000 x 44,000 pixels.

One way of visualizing the size of a four gigapixel image is to consider a photograph of a regulation football pitch (soccer in USA) which is 90m x 45m. A four gigapixel top-down photograph of the entire field at 1mm per pixel would cover an area of 89.4m x 44.7m, which is 99.38% of the indicated size. This mm-per-pixel scale represents perhaps as many as 100 pixels per blade of grass across an entire pitch captured in a single exposure.

how it works?

These systems (and those like them) work quite simply in concept, but are actually quite complex. What happens is you need to mount the compact (point and shoot) camera inside the camera system. Then, simply put the camera in the position you want (mounted or sitting on the ground, etc) and you set up your shot. Remember that when you do this it is going to be a huge image, so make sure you place the camera to capture a great surrounding that adds to your image and doesn’t detract.
Once you have the camera set up you let the machine go to work, It will take photos as it rotates through a system and course and actually moves the camera into different positions and takes the photographs. Finally after the image is saved and captured you move to the computer to start editing the huge file together. Make sure you have some processing power, as this will produce 200+ images, and my MacBook Pro with 512mb video/4gb RAM gets killed with a 10 image photoshop file.

Gigapixel images allow you to capture amazing details inside an image. This allows you to zoom in and out using software online to view the picture as a whole, or the intimate details of the work. This creates a level of interaction with your images, something that is often lost online. The user can manipulate the image and create a larger or smaller image cropped to their liking to enjoy.