Random mumblings of an SSE Scott Howard's Weblog

When Dave Wischnowsky from the Chicago Tribune wrote about my 740 megapixel photo of Sydney By Night last August he called it "A skyline shot like no other", and made the comment that he hoped I would do one of Chicago in the future.

Little did he know at the time that I was already planning to be in Chicago a few months later, and had every intention of trying to produce a similar shot of Chicago!

Around a month ago I finally found the time to finish off Chicago By Night, which ended up being around the 1 gigapixel mark. When I showed it to Wischnowsky he loved it, and after a phone interview I was once again the subject of The Wisch List, this time under the heading of "Chicago's ultimage skyline shot".

After the huge success of my 720 megapixel photo of Sydney earlier in the year (http://blogs.sun.com/Doc/entry/720_megapixel_photo_of_sydney) I decided I needed to go bigger - and where better to do it than the ancient Inca city of Machu Picchu in southern Peru.

The end result is a massive 1500 megapixel (that's 1.5 Gigapixel - 1.5 billion pixels!) image made from over 400 individual photos taken over the course of just over an hour.  Printed out it would be around 10 metres by 5 metres (at 150DPI),

The stiching was done using Autopano Pro and Smartblend on a dual processor Sun V40z, and took over 10 hours per render at full resolution.

To view the end result go to http://www.docbert.org/MP (or just click on the image below). It uses the Zoomify viewer so the bandwidth required to view and even zoom the image is minimal.

I mentioned in a previous blog entry that a photo I'd taken was currently doing the rounds - and here it is.

It's a 720 megapixel image of Sydney Harbour, made by combining 169 individual photos from a 6.2 megapixel Canon 10D.

Click here or on the photo below and you'll be able to view the full image, including the ability to zoom in further than you'd think possible