Friday, December 18, 2009

Prague as seen by superman

In addition to his well known x-ray vision, Superman could use his super-vision to zoom into small details. Details such as this teeny-tiny spot on a monstrous 360 degree panorama of Prague ...



The Panoramic photo site (w/ blog) describes the photo ...
... This is a super high resolution photo. Use your mouse to zoom in and see a startling level of detail. This image is currently (as of 12/2009) the largest spherical panoramic photo in the world. ... When it’s printed, it will be 16 meters (53 feet) long at regular photographic quality (300dpi). It was shot in early October 2009 from the top of the Zizkov TV Tower in Prague, Czech Republic. A digital SLR camera [jf: Canon 5D] and a 200mm lens were used. Hundreds of shots were shot over a few hours; these shots were then stitched together on a computer over the following few weeks...
It seems inevitable that one day, when we look something up on our phone, we'll be able to pan these photos as quickly as my relatively modern (new) machine does today. It's mind-boggling to zoom around Prague on a 27" monitor.'

The image creation used surprisingly average technology ...
...Canon 5d mark 2 and a 70-200mm lens, set to 200mm. The camera was mounted on a robotic device which turned the camera in tiny, precise increments, in every direction....a four year-old windows PC with two single-core 3ghz xeon processors and 8GB of RAM... .... The final image exists as a 120 gigabyte photoshop large (PSB) file. It cannot exist as a TIFF or JPEG file because of their size constraints. The panorama online exists as a few hundred thousand small tiles (in JPEG format), and they take up about 1 gigabyte of disk space.....
The tiled JPGs sum to only 1GB. That would fit on an iPhone.

I'm going to be following the site blog from now on.

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