A team of five photographers has created what they describe as the world's highest definition panoramic photograph by stitching 70,000 digital images together to create a 365 gigapixel photograph. Recorded using a Canon EOS 70D with the EF 400mm f/2.8L IS II USM lens on a 2x converter, the picture took 35 hours of shooting over the course of 15 days just to capture. A further two months were required in post-production to stitch the images together, creating a 46 terabyte finished product.
The project, called in2white and led by Italian photographers Filippo Blengini and Alessandra Bacchilega, took the team to altitudes of 3500m/11,482ft and temperatures of -10°C as they recorded every detail of Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in the European Alps, and the surrounding landscape. Using a Clauss precision pan-and-tilt head the team was able to accurately position the camera and lens combination to shoot tiny sections of the scene in an organized and methodical way, so that every inch of the subject was covered.
Although the view recorded is extremely wide, it is possible to zoom in to clearly see two climbers on the rock face. The whole panorama, with zooming and panning tools, can be seen on the in2white website.
Indeed an amazing project and result especially when considering that they had to find 15 days of similar weather and light conditions to reduce the amount of photoshopping afterwards. I'm wondering when someone actually will (mis)use an aerial digital camera, like the Microsoft UltraCam Eagle with 260 Mega Pixel, for such kind of ultra high resolution terrestrial panoramas. Then you theoretically only would have to take 1400 images and stitch them together. You'll only have to spent "a bit" more money for the camera system and carry more weight uphill :-).
Absolutely amazing photograph - the most detailed and sharpest image I have ever seen - camera companies making lenses have a brand new bench mark to shoot for (they are currently sleeping and probably don't even care about this innovation in photography) - every single photograph ever shot pales in comparison to the sharpness of this image - incredible!!
After reading through the comments I am very amazed. So here we have two parties:
The innovative explorers: - Hiking 15 days up to 3500 m and work at - 10 °C - plan, coordinate and execute 70,000 Images - Create a 365 Giga Pixel Panorama - Create as a vision of what is possible in Ultra High resolution - Write a web app and establish a server that can serve such monster picture (sure can not be off the shelf image sharing app)
The Critics - overlook the accomplishment - criticize anything
I am not shocked by finding negative comments, but I am shocked that negative comments are the majority.
I am sad for the readers of this web site. It is not the first time here I see innovation met with cynicism. It is likely this will motivate innovators to publish their new stuff elsewhere, making dpreview a less interesting place.
Hubert, Just check the comments on the orchestra picture. This is obviously the wrong forum to post and discuss anything art related. Too many gear "experts" (NOT ALL, bust most) that only want to talk about megapixels, wifi, touch screens, and "IBIS".
Thanks for your kind reply. I agree with your judgement. It is still sad there is no place here for innovation, art, creativity and thinking out of the box. It would make this place more exciting. Guess I need to look for another place to to find that. Do you have any recommendations for me?
As for tech gear review, dpreview still of course is the #1 place to go :-)
I found plenty of inspiration here still. Honestly speaking I find many comments of readers more stifling than the authors on dpreview. I find their few often fresh and inspiring.
@ Couscousdelight Consider they choose mostly snow on purpose. As such they can focus on cleaning our the stitching problems in the few areas that have details. This made the workload bearable.
Besides the city will have so much smog and dirt in the air that you can not work with such a long lens as they did.
Very amazing project! I took the tour and was astounded on the level of detail captured. Excellent execution and nice presentation.
Thanks to dpreview to find such interesting project and to bring it to our attention.
I saw several questions below as to why shoot this landscape instead of say a cityscape. The answer is that in order to provide content for 365 Giga Pixel the camera needs to be quite far away. This is why they shot with 800 mm lens on APS-C which makes it 1200 mm full frame equivalent. Close to any city and in lower height there would be simply too much dirt and moisture in the atmosphere to get a clear shot of anything at these distances. Another reason is that this subject has no movement of traffic or leaves, making stitching much easier.
The clarity of the atmosphere would indeed be a consideration. I don't find it uninteresting at all. We obviously live in an over stimulated society where people don't get out in the quiet of nature enough.
I my world, if someone in management sanctioned such an outing, I would fire them personally. Canon putting built-in extenders in all their superteles would be a far more interesting and exciting read in my opinion. I'm just not getting the point of this outing, and keep wondering how this outing will translate into dollars and cents gained.
Let me start by saying that This is great just GREAT !! I love this kind of projects and it makes our industry go to an even higher level, I don't think that some body that has tried to do something different and spend their time on creating some thing different or just creating in general is stupid or wrong even though I would have preferred to see it on a big city where you can see more things happening, how ever somebody did it already with the Gigapan, and I believe I saw an editing mistake by the cable car.
I am sure this photo can have its very important use. Either way kudos ! keep up making the diference.
That's stupid. It's just a technological demonstration. True photography is not about mega-giga-uber-pixels but recognizing a unique and/or beautiful subject or unusual perspective, and CREATING a striking image.
Sure the stitching is poor (but 70,000 images! - can't be easy). But I love it. Lots of detail and fun playing 'where's Wally" looking for the many people and points of interest.
They might simply had this for flexibility. I have a 300 mm f/2.8 plus a x2 converter. I sometimes use it at 600 mm and for me it was worth this investment. A 600 mm f/5.6 dedicated lens would never have been worth it. Despite the resolution I get is incredible, can't imagine a dedicated lens to be better. Check out some of their tour spots. Some of their shorts have incredible resolution.
I appreciate the effort but the result is stitched poorly. For example, look at the cable car and the entire area behind it. It is full of artifacts such as different shading and simply broken lines. I'm sorry to say that this image has nothing going for it but an arbitrary gigapixel number and the rest is simply bad.
Is it possible that the cable moved and so made a smooth stitching for some spots challenge? I am not sure you can have perfect stitching when you have long multi-frame objects that are moving. But I am not a stitching expert.
If the goal is to optimize on the number of pixels, then this is a success. However if it is to create an interesting, well-stitched seamless photograph that like any good photo leaves the viewer with just a bit of wonder, then this is failure. Optimizing on the number of pixels alone can yield a 375GP+1 of a flat wall. I think most people will agree that working months on that is not a great endeavor.
365 you say? I love cool numbers just as much as the next person, but this seems like an imagined PR number.
I understand this was primarily a PR stunt for Canon, and that's OK, but why the heck did they do it like this? Let's ignore stitching errors. Using 2x teleconvertor on 400mm lens on a crop sensor for this is just asking for trouble and shows an otherwise excellent lens in a very bad light. Seriously, this is meant to be pixel peeped and this combination is equivalent to slightly over 200MP on full frame and there is no way any lens can resolve even close to that (let's ignore losses from 2x TC just for fun). They could have just shot it without TC and scaled it up and get the same result.
Also 70k images seems cool, but it's a result of 360 scan where every part of the image is convered by 4 photos, so without stitching it would be ~18k. And then you realize that almost 30% of images are covering the sky. And they are also shooting their footsteps with 1200mm efl lens...
I know that, that's why I'm confused. Anyone interested enough will zoom all the way in some rock in the snow to see detail and will see blurry mess with silly chromatic aberrations. Not a ringing endorsement any way you cut it.
I am not sure what your calculation is about, or how the APSC / 35mm sensor comes into it. 365 GP / 70,000 shots = 5.2 MP per shot. Of course, one has to allow for stitching, but I don't think the image resolution is far beyond the resolving power of the lens / TC combination. The 400 / 2.8 is pretty good, and I assume it was not shot wide open.
Simple, you divide 360 degrees by angle of view of the lens, every next image is rotated half an angle of view (to allow for stitching) both horizontally and vertically. 400mm is not good, it's great, but with 2x TC you are looking at ~460 lines per millimeter. That's almost 200MP for full frame sensor. Phase One just introduced Schneider lens for medium format with 100MP resolution. 400mm would have to be like four times better for this to work. Also, awful CA everywhere.
Amazing Pano that should have had the sky worked on. Looks like they're building another viewing platform on top the the Aiguille du Midi. A ride I can highly recommend!
Great demo of technology and kudos for that but... what a lame place to do something like this. Cool location for a single shot or a normal pano, but so much of this image is featureless and the same as everywhere else in the image. It really should have been a cityscape or somewhere that the amount of detail in the image could have really led to some exciting discoveries as you're looking at it. Half of this 365 gigapixel image is blue SKY! :-( Also, for something where so many resources and time were required, I personally would have picked a better imaging sensor than that of the 70D.
I actually like the emptiness. You have to search for a long time ... then you see something. Nothing wrong with crowded images either. I like that also. But ... this emptiness is almost audible. I wish I hade a high resolution screen, big as my wall.
Imho photography (and the most landscape photography) has three main points. Impressive place (and together impressive angle of view to scene), impressive light, technical quality (technical quality is about correct stitching too).
So there is interesting place (but it is only half truth because thanks to the technique it is not interesting angle of view to scene). Very important is that interesting light is not possible to capture with this kind of scene capturing. Technical quality is only in x and y numbers but with errors in stitching it is not real technical quality as it sounds from resolution parameter.
It's quite pity from point of view how much effortlessly it took.
I found only positive point that it is not with some disgustingly tone mapping (maybe thanks to the x and y parameters which are not supported in HDRsw).
I don't see that it would be good path for Photography at all.
This project may have other application as well that go beyond the pixel peeping. A photographic record of the glacier status for example that may not be shown here. Or mapping stuff out. You just don't know. Being from the area I understand why they are doing and why they love the process so much.
"35 hours of shooting over the course of 15 days just to capture. A further two months were required in post-production to stitch the images together, creating a 46 terabyte finished product". All this to produce a deeply uninteresting picture.
It will be visible through a portal, where you can indeed zoom into the actual pixel level, like the gigapixel panoramas at 360cities.com - don't you think?
"It will be visible through a portal, where you can indeed zoom into the actual pixel level, like the gigapixel panoramas at 360cities.com "
Currently, it seems you can actually zoom _past_ the pixel level currently. This is why it's so damn unsharp when fully zoomed in, even if you take the IQ-deteriorating effects of the teleconverter into account.
Honestly, only a relative few care about Guinness records today (unlike the 70's when kids would thumb through a Guinness book). Most young people today would rather be on the Forbes list than have an awesome feat recorded in Guinness... unless the feat was to be the first / youngest to amass a Trillion U.S. Dollars in personal, liquid assets. A whoppingly large photo... kinda, pales in comparison ;)
I took a look at the pano, in large part because of all the criticism - I half expected to find it was exaggerated or unjustified. But no, sadly the critics are correct this time. It's a poor choice of subject with far too little interest to justify the gigapixel treatment, but above all it is dreadfully executed. What a waste of time and effort.
everybody is learning and trying to improve, so not a total waste, i guess. but ye i think your are rigtht about the quality of the job not being over the topl.
I concur. Nothing wrong in pushing the logistics and IT envelope (we are not talking about Photography here anyway, are we?), but when you present your work it ought to make you proud of what you have done. What's the point in showing something so poorly put together? Only because it's big? Pity.
I agree. the fact that the cables holding the cable car have obviously visible breaks in them is actually absurd! What? Don't they have anyone to manually adjust any of the photos? Even the cable car itself looks bad, with halos, showing that the shot was exposed differently. Why? That couldn't have been necessary!
I DON'T agree that the location is uninteresting. This image gives people stuck in the desert or along the coast, where most people in the World reside, a view from the top of a mountain. How can that not be a wonderful location for many millions or even billions of people to explore from? Besides, almost nobody would have the opportunity to view such a place through a telescope like that 400mm f2.8 lens. And this multi-gigapixel image gives us all the ability to view the place from the comfort of our own homes. I think it's a wonderful thing they've done . . . but with lacking attention to detail.
"Don't they have anyone to manually adjust any of the photos?"
You can't easily fix parallax / movement errors other than completely photoshopping the entire object out.
"Even the cable car itself looks bad, with halos, showing that the shot was exposed differently. Why? That couldn't have been necessary!"
I've posted this several times in this very comment section: they used variable exposure. This is why those original frames have different exposure.
With a proper body with significantly higher DR, fixed exposure could have been used. Then, no such problems would exist. Of course, the 70D simply doesn't have proper shadows to lift so fixed exposure shooting and later shadow lifting would have been impossible - other than AE bracketing.
What a mess. I don't get the point of making a super-hi-res image with SO many severe errors.
The errors are so huge and numerous that it wouldn't look good even when printed at very mediocre size. A simple single-row pano without those errors (which is very easy to do) would look *much* better in a print.
"Sure, Canon falls short with their DR, but come on - this picture/subject didin't need any DR!"
Actually, it did. Just observe the visible exposure changes between individual frames - something pano stitcher apps just can't eliminate. This is why decent pano shooters use fixed exposure and, of course, a proper, high-DR body. (Not the, in this regard, measly 70D.)
Menneisyys, I know! A real shame this was not done with a D810...actually fudgettaboutit! Why now use a phase one? If you go tru all the trouble. But I know why, because Canon has always been HUGE in Italy for some unexplainable reason. So it's the default choice.
I don't understand, why you people are bashing this project? They spend their time to produce this nice panoramic photo and they don't ask from you anything in return.
Because of - using one of the worst choices for landscape, particularly panorama, photography? - not using the latest-and-greatest Canon cameras available, targeted at landscape photography too (the 5Ds (R)) in a project sponsored by Canon themselves - having a lot of sometimes major stitching errors in absolutely static places (not only moving ones like the cables)
point 1: unless you are northern italian or southern french you cannot possibly understand the bond we have with that mountain and the reason why that subject was chosen.
Maybe at the time of the project CLAUSS RODEON wasn't compatible with Canon 5Ds (r) and it doesn't matter. What does matter to me is that they freeze their buts of in order to make this project happen.
Nobody was freezing their buts off when they were shooting this! It's beautiful on a sunny day in the mountains, even in the winter. They were not shooting photos in a snow storm! They surely didn't shoot the photos when it was windy, because of the camera shake that would have been evident in the images. I've been on the top of mountains at 12,000 feet elevation,a and it's glorious! NOT too cold . . . unless you're stupid and don't wear warm clothes, appropriate for the location and time of year. Yes, they carried some heavy gear, but definitely no big deal. Whey they really spent a lot of effort on, but failed to be truly successful, was when they stitched the panorama together. They should have used Hugin or something maybe. Hopefully their next try will be better. Maybe they're already working on the World's first terapixel photo.
Oh, there are visible stitching errors, e.g. on the right side of the highest mount in the middle. Two lines vertical, bad errors. I've used Microsoft Image Composite Editor to build ab. 1000 Mt images with no errors. Yes, this a little bit larger...
Yup, they must have messed up shooting. Pretty poor results - at places, entire input frames seem to be missing (hence the low-res approximation in their places), _major_ seams etc.
And this has nothing to do with using one of the worst candidates for landscape / pano shooting: a 70D...
Regardless of whether the camera is the best, or whether the panorama is correctly stitched, does anyone else find the website incredibly annoying? If I want to look at a panorama I want it to stay still when I've finished moving my mouse, not continue to gently drift across the screen....
To explain: A full spheric panorama taken with a 70D/800mm combo (what the authors did) has a native resolution of 1494 Gigapixels. Assuming they only recorded the quarter part nearer the horizon, we end up with 374 GP, very close to the reported image size. I.e., that 365 GP panorama should be razor sharp at the pixel level, given the effort of the project.
But it is not. E.g., zoom into Mont Blanc summit, a complete mess of sharpened softness.
I'll call the project an epic fail.
However, I still like the website and panorama. But 1/4 quarter the resolution (1/16 of pixels, #shots and capture / processing time) would have done the same. Except for the missing hyperbole, of course.
That may simply be caused by the needlessly high maximal zoom level allowed in the online pano viewer. The 400mm Canon lens should produce much-much better results. The guys should just decrease the maximal zoom level. This zoom level is only OK for small-screen users; for anyone with screens larger than 7-8" a significantly smaller zoom level should be used.
(Yes, I do speak from experience. I've developed an OpenGL-based gigapixel pano engine for iOS and WebGL and have played a LOT with the most optimal zoom ranges on different target devices.)
I'm fairly sure my iPhone has something that can pretty much do the same thing AND upload it to Instagram without having to spend time in post #nofilterneeded
I met a nudist girl many years ago, and she invited me to a nudist "meeting" on a beach. Now, I'm no Brad Pitt, but I'm no Denny DeVito either, just average in about everything (looks, shape, size, height etc.) I thought I would be the one every one chuckled at. Oh boy, was I wrong! Almost every man and woman there fully deserved a "sag" award... ;)
P.S. The experience was "liberating" though. It felt quite good. One of those things you've got to try in your life at least once.
dunno why I'm not impressed with this, I zoomed in on the crane and while I can make out the letters, it's blurry and undetailed, doesn't compute when they took so many shots
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