Welcome to my new experimental site into the world of Giga Pixel Photography.

I've seen many photographers creating Giga-pixel panoramas. I have been creating many smaller panoramas but nothing bigger than 200-400 Million Pixels. I Just never tried to create one as big as 1 Giga Pixel. Until today.

After some experimentation I finally figured out a procedure. The way in which you create a Giga Pixel photo is by taking hundreds of photographs with a panorama head and some patience. The first Panorama was shot by hand totaling 252x12 Million Pixel Canon RAW images. Each photo needs to overlap the other by about 25% to make stitching possible.

The RAW images where loaded in Canon's Digital Photo Professional software. It is important to make the changes before stitching because very little image editing programs will be able to open a 64000 pixel by 20000 pixel image. By the way not even Adobe Photoshop can open it. The images are exported to 8bit Jpeg images and imported into a stitching program.

The next big hurdle to overcome is to have a lot of patience and a machine with lots of RAM. I did the stitching of my first panorama on the public beta of Windows 7 - 64bit. The machine has got a Core 2 Quad CPU (2.33GHz) with 8 Gig of RAM. Without this sort of hardware setup a 1 Gigapixel Panorama might take up to 1 full day to process. The machine took about an hour to crunch through all the data and produced a 1.07GB JPEG file with best quality. The image produced was 63525 pixels by 20182 pixels given total of 1.282 Giga Pixels.

You may view the final creation here. It is a picture of a workshop with some machinery and junk lying around. I wanted to test capturing a lot of detail and dept of field. You will notice a few focus mistakes but mostly because the picture was created with a Canon 28-55mm Kit lense at maximum zoom. According to the light conditions ISO200 and F5.6 was selected with autofocus turned on. Normally I would do manual focus. The 252 photos took me about 24 minutes to capture on a Canon 450D with 8Gig SDHC memory card.