This contraption allowed to automatically shoot nearly a million (!) of pictures of the Dubai skyline. After that, a computer took its time to assemble all these images in a humongous 44,880 megagigapixel panorama!

Source: Engadget.

This impressive photo is made of 1,665 individual shots captured with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II photo camera armed with a 400mm tele-lens, and combined together on a powerful computer.

Web site: http://www.dresden-26-gigapixels.com/

Source: Engadget.

See the size of the larger sensor: The RED 617 Mysterium Monstro sensor has 261,352,000 pixels (about the same number as sensitive cells at the back of a human eye).

The images to come out of it will certainly be monstrous as suggested by the sensor name.

Look at the full set of the Windows 7 wallpapers. This is the upcoming version of Windows (after Windows Vista, it seems that Microsoft intends to switch back to a numbering scheme). Most of them may be colourful, but with very smooth surfaces where your icons will be appearing quite neatly and they offer a nice contrast.

So, I was quite interested when I stumbled upon the collection of pictures taken by the HiRise (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera installed on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter). Shooting photos of Mars surface, this photo camera brings extraordinary color images that provide nice patterns to be used as background for your Windows desktop (or even Linux or Mac desktop) and can be renewed quite regularly: Their catalog is available on the University of Arizona web site.

Furthermore, they provide an enormous resolution for their images which is a very good way to extract any size you may need for your extra-high-resolution background or to cover your 2- or 3-LCD display. Or even more. If you feel that there own selection of wallpapers is not enough:

• 800×600
• 1024×768
• 1152×864
• 1280×960
• 1440×1080
• 1600×1200
• 1920×1440
• 2048×1536
• 2560×1600

You can still stick to the original size (JPEG-2000 format images range between 0.5GB and 3GB).

And the good news is that there is no copyright restrictions, so you could do pretty much what you want with them: Really free desktop wallpapers.

True Marble

True Marble GLCD by Unearthed Outdoors, LLC is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Can you find Waldo (er, no! the dancing policeman)?

Source: Photoart – Kalmar, via YLovePhoto.

Source: YLovePhoto.

It was taken over the course of 20 days and includes 178 different people.

Source: Simon Hoegsberg, via The Online Photographer.

Here comes a photo camera with 1400 mega-pixels. This is the camera installed in Hawai in the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (PanSTARRS) telescope.

I say that when Kirkland AFB builds a photo camera, Canon, Nikon, Sony and the others should bow and admire.

Source: Really Rocket Science.

The first thing to know is that light diffraction is a very general phenomenon and quite natural. It’s been a long time already that scientists and engineers noticed that -on the one hand- light rays are slightly deflected while running through a very small orifice and -on the other hand- two light rays can interact with each other on the condition that they are have very paths nearly perfectly parallel. This is even one of the most significant and founding elements of quantum physics. When you combine both those phenomenons, you will notice that light going through a very small opening like camera lens diaphragm will produce not exactly the expected neat circle but a more irregular and circular shape that you can see in the illustrative figure that goes along this paragraph: Usually named an Airy disk or Airy disc.

As a matter of fact, the size of the Airy disc can be computed relatively easily and only depends on the opening of the diaphragm where light goes through.

As this is only happening at the microscopic scale, you could think that this has no importance. But there is an additional difficulty for the digital photographer: Silicon-based image sensors are really working at this scale. For example, here are the sizes of some of the common images sensors on the market:

• APS-C sensor (1:1.5 crop factor / Sony SLR) of 6 mega-pixels: 8 µm
• APS-C sensor (1:1.6 crop factor / Canon SLR) of 8 mega-pixels: 6.5 µm
• APS-C sensor (1:1.6 crop factor / Canon SLR) of 12 mega-pixels: 5.3 µm
• Full Frame sensor of 12 mega-pixels (Canon 5D): 8.5 µm
• Full Frame sensor of 24 mega-pixels (Sony Alpha 900): 6 µm
• 1/2,5″ sensor of 8.2 mega-pixels (HP Photosmart R937 point-and-shoot): 1.7 µm

As you can notice all cameras are not born equal from this point of view. For the same number of pixels, Full Frame sensors have notably larger pixels than APS-C cheaper SLR cameras. Point and shoot compact cameras are in a completely different range. And phone cameras are pushing the lower limit of technology for smaller sensors (and correspondingly small pixels).

When you compare the values from the table of Airy circle sizes and the size of the pixels of your photo camera, you easily understand that closing the diaphragm of your top-notch lens is not enough to produce super-crisp images out of your brand new 12-mega-pixel camera: a 12MP Canon SLR will hit the Airy disc size as soon as you close down to f/5.6/; The images do not immediately become bad, but your pixels are not used at their best. And, sometimes, you wonder why you don’t get better results than from the older camera still in your bag.

A good algorithm of image correction may compensate part of this problem (as this phenomenon is very predictable and easy to modelize with computers, it is relatively easy to counter-act with software), but there limits to what firmware can do in our cameras, too. The situation is simply desperate with the smallest sensors of small point-and-shoot cameras and phone cameras. More pixels bring them nothing except bigger images files on Flash cards.

On the contrary, camera manufacturers firmly aim at larger sensors (so-called Full Frame sensors) in order to compensate these issues. This is what is driving the current rush to Full Frame at Canon, Nikon, Sony and the others despite the still prohibitive cost of the huge chunks of silicon used at the heart of these photo cameras.

Of course, do not refrain from closing the diaphragm to improve the depth of field of your image, but keep in mind the magnitude order of the limit diaphragms of your camera in order not to be surprised by the appearance of some diffraction in some of your images.

Additional information:

• Diffraction & photography, at Cambridge in color,
• Airy disk, at Wikipedia.

Ils ajoutent que le nombre des objectifs permet de se passer de la qualité individuelle ce qui devrait abaisser sensiblement le prix total.

Le proto réalisé vise 3 méga-pixles, mais ils pensent pouvoir ainsi construire un appareil photo d’un méga-pixel.

Source : ScienceBlog.com.

I bow to this master!

Sources: Greg Scott photo gallery, Greg Scott web site.

Another previous work from HaltaDefinizione (with only 8.6 billion pixels).

Photographers are avid of more pixels per frame. Most of them are also fond of panoramic photos (they look so cool). Why not join forces and make a contraption able to shoot panoramas with billions of pixels (multi-giga-pixel panoramas)?

This is what Charmed Labs and Carnegie Mellon University did when they developed the GigaPan robotic camera mount (Press release). Rather than stitching together hundreds of images painstakingly taken one-by-one, the tripod mount is able to pan through a landscape and capture the individual images needed by a computer program to build these wondrous images.

In the end, if you want to see more (and browse a lot of panoramic images), you should stop by one of the following web sites:

• GigaPan web site
• The Global Connection Project (at CMU)

Not all the images are perfect, but some of them are gorgeous.

GigaPan motorised mount on a tripod. It hold nearly any kind of digital SLR camera and pans slowly to capture a full panoramic image.

 

The GigaPan is not currently available yet but could be no more than a few hundreds of dolalrs, and work with open source software (so, free software).

Source: Futura-Sciences.

Technically, the sensor is impressive. It’s no less than 40cm-wide and hosts 1.4billion pixels (can you say “1.4 giga-pixel camera”?) but there will be four of them installed in Hawai.

Source: NewScientist.

Using several images of the same location, they have been able to remove clouds from most of the map, but also, they gave a very clear view in near real-life colours (a difficult aim for most of satellite imagery): Natural colour at 30m resolution (or black and white at 15m resolution).

All in all, this is supposed to help scientists observe this region of the world that is critical for the understanding of global warming and its future effects on human life on Earth.

The result is at http://lima.usgs.gov.

Thanks to Science Daily for this information.

This is a group of photographers collectively known as The Legacy Project that made the mad project possible. Nothing was utterly impossible. Everything was astoundingly difficult:

• Build the image paper by preparing the immense cloth piece with dozens of liters of sensitive gelatine emulsion,
• Build a dark chamber out of fighter plane hangar with enormous quantities of paint, tape and foam gap filler,
• Find the right exposure parameters with test strips as large as a door (result: 35 minutes of exposure).

In the end, the biggest photo in the world is a black and white photo (colour did not crush B&W yet, so digital photography still has a long way to go…)

Source: Neatorama.