Jeffrey Martin may not be some glitzy celebrity from Hollywood but he is the founder of 360Cities.net, the web’s largest collection of stunning, georeferenced panoramic photos. Jeffrey Martin is also the creator of two insanely high-resolution panorama photos which makes him somewhat of a celebrity to his professional photography community.
His 320 gigapixel BT Tower panorama photo, created by stitching together 48,640 images taken with 7 Canon EOS 7Ds, has officially broken the record for the world’s largest panoramic photo. So how big is big? If printed at normal resolution, the photo would be 98 meters long (323 feet) and 23 meters high (77 feet) – almost as big as Buckingham Palace!
The panorama photo was taken from atop of BT Tower in London in partnership with British Telecom to commemorate the Olympic summer of 2012 and offers a massive, browsable 360-degree view of London in extreme detail.
Each of the 7Ds are equipped with an EF 400mm f/2.8L IS II USM lens and Extender EF 2x III teleconverter, and then attached to a Rodeon VR Head ST robotic panorama head. The BT Tower panorama photo is so huge; it took three weeks and the abilities of a powerful Fujitsu Celsius R920 workstation to actually stitch everything together.
You can browse the entire 360-degree London 320-gigapixel panorama photo here.
His next biggest panorama photo would be a 600,000 pixel-wide panorama photo of Tokyo city. This second largest panorama photo consists of 10,000 photos stitched together by the same 12-core Fujitsu Celsius R920 workstation. With all that processing power, it still took him 12 weeks to process the Hi-Res panorama photo. While it took 7 cameras for London, in Tokyo he only need one trusty 7D and 400mm f/5.6L lens mounted on top of a Clauss Rodeon VR Head ST robotic panorama head.
The photo was taken on September 2012 from the lower observation deck of the Tokyo Tower. The Tokyo panorama photo weighs in at 180-gigapixels as compared to the 320 London photo. Even so, no image of such size never existed as a single file. Even Photoshop can only handle images up to 300,000 pixels wide.
