Prague with a resolution of 405 gigapixels is the third largest photo in the world
The Old Town Hall has been repaired since last year. The American photographer Jeffrey Martin, who lives in Prague, took advantage of this and climbed to the top of the scaffolding with his photographic equipment, from where he took one of the largest panoramas in the world. You can view the image in 405 gigapixel resolution at gigapanorama.cz/panorama-prahy. However, it can also be seen live in the Mánes Gallery, where it is printed in a circle with a diameter of 16 meters and measures 60 meters in length and 3 meters in height.
Martin is an icon of the field and you may know his website 360 cities, a giant gallery of spherical photos from around the world. In the past, he himself photographed Prague from Petřín in 34 Gpx or London in 320 Gpx, which was a record at the time. Today is according to records on Wikipedia biggest night panorama Kuala Lumpur (846 Gpx) and then a composite image moon surface (681 Gpx).
The Prague skyline was created by stitching 8000 photos with a resolution of 50 Mpx. Martin photographed with a Canon 5DS R full frame (price from CZK 78,000) and a Canon EF 600 mm f / 4 telephoto lens (price over CZK 300,000). The device was on a massive tripod with a robotic head that controlled gentle stepping and 360 ° rotation.
“This is where the real work has just begun. It was necessary to go through all the photos and start putting them into a giant mosaic. My work was complicated mainly by different lighting conditions on different days of photography. Some photos were then poorly focused at high speed and had to be uploaded,Says Jeffrey Martin.
The project was created in cooperation with the Czech representation of Fujitsu. This lent Martin a Celsius R970power workstation. In full fire, it can cost over a million crowns, but the exact configuration used to process the panorama is unknown. But we know that it had “only” 128 GB of RAM.