Yesterday, Rouzbeh and I set out to photograph the murals in the Mission district of San Francisco. However, by the time we got there, it had started drizzling, so we had to put off that project for another day.
On the way to the Mission, we decided to drive up to Bernal Heights to indulge in another project that we’ve been trying out for a while now – create a gigapixel panorama of the city. The basic idea is to take hundreds of images using a long lens, and then stitch them together to get an image with a ridiculous amount of detail. That, however, is easier planned than done. Not only is it difficult to zoom in with a 400mm lens and pan across a cityscape without missing a spot, it’s equally hard to stitch those images together without misaligning some of them, or blending exposures incorrectly.
Yesterday’s attempt gave us nearly 430 images of 21 Megapixels each shot with a 400mm lens, and a final image that was over 8 gigapixels. However, the project remains a work in progress while we fix holes in the picture and stitch them better.
In addition to the images we took for the gigapixel project, I also shot a few images with my trusty wide-angle, and put them together as a preview of the scene we are trying to capture. The image above shows how the component (raw, full frame) images were put together.
This is the final (non-gigapixel version) result of the handful of wide-angle shots of the city. It may not be gigapixel, but it’s still pretty big and will make a gorgeous print.
