Bergman's GigaPan inauguration image

Inauguration GigaPan © David Bergman

Photographer David Bergman was shooting pics during Obama's inauguration with a Canon G10 mounted to a Gigapan Imager. So what you say? Well, the prosumer Canon G10 weighs in at 14.7 megapixels and is no slouch in the high res department. (And on the list of things I would one day like to play with). But thats not the real story.

When mated to the Gigapan Imager the final rendered shot - composed of 220 single images, came out as a 1,474 megapixel image. Of course, according to Bergman compiling it on a MacBook Pro took 6.5 hours to come up with that 2GB sized .TIF image! And I get annoyed when a 120MB .TIF chokes my machine in CS3 for a couple of mins! :)

The Gigapan Imager is a robotic camera mount that lets photographers take multiple images and stitch them together in the way photo editing software stitches panoramas, with the end result being a huge image file.

Bergman has it on his blog (and it's currently on the Gigapan page too) in a way you can zoom in and around much like you can with GoogleMaps or GoogleEarth. And the image is spectacular. Start with the base image (above) and go tight on Obama (below) - or anyone even in the far distance - and you will be amazed. I think I saw this mega/giga sized imagery done once before on a neighbourhood in Europe and blogged about it on my old blog, but it was nothing like this. His most recent post talks more about the details of the day, how the image was shot and that:

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is not sleeping.
President Bush is not sending a text message.
Yes, Oprah Winfrey is blocked by a camera tower.
We’re still looking for Waldo.

detail of the Inauguration GigaPan © David Bergman

Mike

Mike Wood Photography