Gigapan!

Lately I’ve been getting excited about the Gigapan, a robotic tripod head attachment that enables one to shoot a super-high-res panorama (up to 360 degrees if you want!) by shooting dozens (or more often hundreds) of tightly zoomed in images and then stitching them together with software.  Gigapan has loads of cool examples (the technology is particularly suited for creating big gorgeous landscape prints with lots and lots of detail, but also for making ‘treasure hunts’ for viewers online by shooting huge scenes with lots of people in a crowd.  You may have seen the giant gigapan images that were shot at the obama inaugeration last year…. this is the same system.  Currently they aren’t large enough to mount more than a point and shoot or a small (nonpro) SLR.  I used my Canon G9 for this.  It works pretty well except in this case I wish I’d set it to take more shots at the bottom of the panorama so I could have kept the foreground of the pond and the painter’s feet and ground below in the composition.  After you stitch your images together (it takes a long time on your computer!) you still need to crop and make any other adjustments– but the resulting file size is quite huge as you can imagine.  Take a look at my first try with the Gigapan– and then take a peak around their site at some of thee most popular images– it is sort of addictive wandering around in these giant images (mine is not a good example), especially the ones with loads of people!

http://www.gigapan.org/gigapans/44624/

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