Behold! A 400,000 megapixel panorama of Prague!
Jeffrey Martin (previously) writes, "I shot this gigapixel image last year in mid November. It's made of 8000 photos, shot with a fullframe SLR and a 600mm lens. It was shot from thetop of Prague's 'Orloj', the clock tower on Old Town Square, built in 1410.The tower had a scaffolding all over it at the time, going all the way uppast the top of the roof: a perfect platform for a high resolution 360photo, if only I could get up there! I actually didn't even considertrying, as the answer to such questions is usually 'no'. My colleague, arather more enterprising Marketing guy, was able to smooth talk them intosaying 'yes'. Wow!
After signing my life away to the construction company who was in charge ofthe construction site, I went up to the "top" of the tower - at least, thetop floor where tourists normally go when the place is not underconstruction. Then, stepping out of the window onto the scaffolding, anddescending another five floors on rickety ladders and boards sitting onpoles, hopefully bolted together with expertise. The whole thing swayedlightly in the wind. A rather terrifying experience, at least the firsttime. All the way to the top, above the spires of the tower, I attached myeight meter monopod to the scaffolding (with about 20 oversize zip ties, noless) and fired up my trusty camera robot, which would allow me to remotelymove and trigger the camera in preprogrammed positions.
I did this for three days, from morning until the light faded at around4pm. When remotely triggering a camera 8000 times, mounted on a robot thatis supposed to move in a programmed pattern, things can go wrong. In threedays, I shot many sets of images, each set between 4000 and 8000 images,with both a 400mm and a 600mm lens. None of these sets of images actuallyyielded an acceptable stitched panorama. There were issues of one kind oranother with each set of images - some images out of focus, some imagesoverexposed because the sun popped out from behind the clouds for a minuteor two. Thus began a very long and laborious process of combining a lot ofimages, shot at different times, maybe even with a different lens, into asingle image.
One year later and it's all done. It's not perfect, there are issues that Iwould still like to fix. But the result is something I'm at least happy toshare for now. I hope you enjoy exploring this image. If anyone out therehas ideas for what I could shoot next - what tower in what city to shootfrom - I'm all ears!