Largest Photo in the World?

[Michael Pancier]

Click here (http://www.dresden-26-gigapixels.com/dresden26GP).


Content of the panorama

The photo was taken on the roof of the building "Haus der Presse" and starts at the left side with the Ostragehege. You can see the Congress Center and the Maritim Hotel rightwards. In the center is the city of Dresden with the famous Semperoper (back view), the castle and the Church of Our Lady. In the background is the television tower and you can identify outlines of the Saxon Switzerland. In the right part you can see the south of Dresden.


Technical characteristics

The picture was made with the Canon 5D mark II and a 400mm-lens. It consists of 1.665 full format pictures with 21.4 megapixel, which was recorded by a photo-robot in 172 minutes. The converting of 102 GB raw data by a computer with a main memory cache of 48 GB and 16 processors took 94 hours. With a resolution of 297.500 x 87.500 pixel (26 gigapixel) the picture is the largest in the world. (stand December 2009)

[JH Tugs]

Thanks for sharing this - it's fascinating!

[Alfred Forns]

.. are you going to try one like that Mike :D:)

[Axel Hildebrandt]

Thanks for sharing this, Michael! It's been ages that I was in Dresden, 20 to be precise.

[Magnus Thornberg]

Here is the video behind the scenes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VfeGLxUlU0

He should put some time to adjust the exposure and contrast! The sharpness is not so god either when zooming in!

/M

[Roger Clark]

While this is impressive, and may well be the largest image put together by a consumer digital camera, it is not the largest image around. Satellite mosaics creating maps of the Earth and planets are larger. For example, look at google earth. The earth is a little over 510,000,000 square km. At 30 meters/pixel, the whole earth is about 567 gigapixels, and at 1 meter 459,000 gigapixels. Google earth is between 30 and 1 meters/pixel.

Then add to the fact that the satellite data includes more than just 3 colors and the data sets are huge. Such multi-color images are called image cube. I'm working on a terabyte image cube for Mars and a 500 gigabyte image cube for the Moon.

Roger

[Michael Pancier]

.. are you going to try one like that Mike :D:)

I don't think my Macbook would be able to process that baby. :D I like the concept though and can imagine the possibilities of doing something like this but say in the grand canyon; in the mountains; etc.

[Julie Kenward]

That's amazing. 94 hours to process? Boggles the mind, doesn't it?

[Arlon Motsch]

Not the biggest but still pretty big. This composite of shots at Machu Picchu is pretty impresive.
http://www.aguntherphotography.com/machupicchu_222mp.html

[DonaldNel]

Largest actual (non-stitched) photograph....single image, on several tons of canvas, In Guiness Book of records for largest photograph and largest camera (pinhole lens) entries...

http://www.legacyphotoproject.com/