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A few days ago, we told you that Gerald Donovan has stitched together over 4000 images to create a 45-gigapixel photograph of Dubai. Now we have a YouTube video showing the making of the image.

via : The making of Dubai 45 Gigapixels

Hardware, Science extreme, panorama, photography

A new world record in terrestrial panorama size as Gerald Donovan has stitched together over 4000 images to create a 45-gigapixel photograph of Dubai.

4,250 individual shots taken with a Canon 7D and the 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 L zoom at 400mm. Total shooting time circa 3 hours 30 minutes, in 37C heat (that’s the temperature in the shade – the camera and lens were almost too hot to touch at the end of this).

Some simply ridiculous resolution here, as evidenced by Gizmodo.

via gigapan: Dubai 45 gigapixels.

Graphics, Hardware extreme, panorama, photography

A group efford by Kolor, Arnaud Frich Photography, and Extraordinair-Urban robs former champion 360Cities of their “World’s Largest Panorama” title with a new massive 26-Gigapixel interactive panoram of Paris.  No normal camera could capture the detail they needed, so they constructed a custom rig:

Paris 26 Gigapixels was shot with very unique hardware: 2 Canon 5D Mark II (21.1 MP) each with a 300 mm f4.0 with a tele converter in order to get a  600mm /f8.0 needed to beat the record, mounted on a custom-made panoramic head.

The images were then stitched with the program Autopano Giga.

Browse around with the mouse and keyboard and marvel at the detail they’ve captured.  My favorite find so far is that you can actually see the individual people on the upper level of the Notre Dame Cathedral.

Paris 26 Gigapixels – Interactive virtual tour of the most beautiful monuments of Paris.

Graphics, Hardware extreme, panorama, photography

360Cities has published what they think might be the World’s Largest Spherical Panoramic image, an 18 Gigapixel Photo from the top of the TV Tower in Prague.

This image was shot on October 3, 2009. It is made from hundreds of individual photographs and stitched together into a single seamless panoramic image.

We have put the entire image, in full resolution, online for everyone to see. It’s possible to zoom in to an incredible level of detail.

In addition they’re having a contest.  Follow their clues to find the hidden treasure in the image, and win $100.

Prague TV Tower – World’s Largest Spherical Panorama. via 360Cities Blog

Science 360cities, extreme, panorama, photography

In what can only be called a true labor of love, Axel Mellinger of Central Michigan University spent 22 months and traveled over 26,000 miles to to take thousands of photos of the night sky.   Merging them all into one massive panoramic view, he has created what is quite possibly the world’s largest and highest resolution image of the night sky.  Along the way he encountered several issues with varying brightness and distortions, requiring some interesting solutions.

“Due to artificial light pollution, natural air glow, as well as sunlight scattered by dust in our solar system, it is virtually impossible to take a wide-field astronomical photograph that has a perfectly uniform background,” Mellinger said.

To fix this, Mellinger used data from the Pioneer 10 and 11 space probes. The data allowed him to distinguish star light from unwanted background light. He could then edit out the varying background light in each photograph. That way they would fit together without looking patchy.

via Chicago Journals – News.

Science astronomy, extreme, panorama, photography

The last version of Hugin was in October 2008, and now Hugin 0.8.0 is out and available.  The biggest feature I’m looking forward to is the new OpenGL Accelerated preview window:

A new Fast Preview window has been added, this uses OpenGL graphics acceleration to show changes as they happen. You can drag photos around the window and they will warp to their new positions in real-time. Everything else you need to turn, pan and crop your panorama can now be done interactively in the Fast Preview.

This Fast Preview also now acts as a hub for working with a panorama project: the Identify mode lets you click on the overlap between two photos to bring up the Control Point editor for that pair of photos.

via Hugin-0.8.0 release notes.

Graphics hugin, panorama, software

Robert Stadd, visual effects supervisor on Public Enemies, found himself in a quandary when it came to the opening scene where John Dillinger breaks into prison to bust out his friends.  Unfortunately, in the background would be a shot of an adjacent building but there was no information on the camera arrangement or distance away to the building.  The solution?  Build a large tiled image that could be zoomed or warped as necessary.

In the final composite, the tiled background has been inserted into the shot. Note the size of the background is larger than in the reference photo, and it was in a different position. Only by using a high-resolution, tiled background could we ensure that it would work in the shot, from a grain size and position standpoint. Approximately eight pictures were used to tile the background, creating a file that was roughly 200MB.

He also covers some helpful tips on creating your own tiled images, such as manual controls for exposure and white balance and maintaining a 30% overlap.

via The Art of Tiling in Public Enemies.

Graphics illusion arts, movie, panorama, photography, vfx

AutoStitch, the technology licensed to ILM for panoramic production for film uses, is now available on the iPhone.  They’re calling it the ‘first automatic stitcher’ for the iPhone, which I doubt in the wake of tools like Mosaica, but it’s still pretty impressive.  Using the same technology used in Autopano and other tools, it’s now on the iPhone with impressive results.

AutoStitch now brings the latest in image recognition technology to your iPhone. Stitch images in any order or arrangement, using photos taken from your iPhones camera. Just select a set of images from the camera roll or photo albums, and AutoStitch does the rest.

It’s now available in the iPhone App Store for $1.99 .

AutoStitch iPhone.

Graphics, Hardware camera, ilm, iphone, panorama, photography

Gigapan.org is hosting an impressive 0.29 gigapixel (290 MegaPixel) image of an ant (presumably dead).

This is a 136 images of a whole ant (the head of which was imaged before by Jay) taken using the nanogigapn unit. It is magnified 800x using a Scanning Electron Microscope. The Antennas were not part of the original gigapan, and were taken by hand, they are made of 16 pictures and were put together in photoshop and added to the ant which was stitched by the gigapan stitcher.

Hit their website for the full resolution image.

via gigapan: Ant.

Science extreme, gigapixel, panorama, photography

A new app for the iPhone named “Mosaica” aims to make creating montages & panorams easier.  Through a demonstration video  on YouTube, they show how you can snap multiple pictures and have them stitched on the phone automatically.  Then you can pan around and view them, or upload them to a webserver for sharing & higher-quality images.  Supporting multiple angles and zooms (close-ups for detail, distance for context) it’s a pretty impressive tool and the results he shows on the phone (with live processing times) are impressive.

See the video after the break.

Read more…

Science iphone, panorama, photography, software