80 billion pixels,... but is it art?
A panorama of London forms the world's highest definition photograph ever, some 80 billion pixels, so detailed that the photographers say a naked woman caught in a distant window had to be photoshopped out.
The London Project was shot by photographer Jeffrey Martin over the course of three days from his vantage point 36 storeys up in the air at the top of the Centre Point building. He took 7,886 high resolution photographs which were then fed into a Fujitsu Celsius computer with 192GB of RAM. It took six weeks to seamlessly stitch the images together into an 80 gigapixel composite image. No other city has ever been captured in such detail.
Of course, there is little point in producing such an image if all you intend to do is print it out on an A4 sheet of paper or use it as desktop wallpaper on a screen. Instead it has been mounted on the web and magically comes alive using technology similar to Google's StreetView to allow you to look in any direction out from the tower and zoom in on any small section of the picture. There is an astonishing amount of detail in the picture, and there must be equally astonishing technology behind this to be able to deliver these continuous views on demand. It is well worth looking at, just to see how good modern photography can be.
The London Project
www.skillzone.net/shortcut/nl35london
23rd November 2010