Getting the largest image in the world has become a race, and with each new milestone, the results are even more surprising. This time, a team led by Italian photographer Filippo Blengini climbed the famous Mont Blanc to develop the super-image. 70,000 frames, 35 hours of shooting, 46 terabytes of data, and 365 gigapixels form the equation of this extraordinary panorama.
In February 2013, we talked about the previous record among panoramic images, a shot of London composed of 50,000 individual frames, which in total added up to 320 gigapixels. A project of this nature not only demands patience, but also endurance. Even when near a city, the photographer (or “the” photographers) must tolerate the hostility of the weather (depending on the region), move the equipment, and deal with any bureaucratic restrictions before checking that the thousands of images involved are in order. Needless to say, only a special robotic tripod has the precision sufficient for the subsequent joining of the frames to be perfect, but the human eye must be there anyway.
The Mont Blanc Panorama
The latest odyssey in panoramic images takes us to Mont Blanc itself, where Italian photographer Filippo Blengini and his team made a fabulous capture of the mountain. The magic number rises to 365 gigapixels, and if each of the 70,000 images that make up the panorama were printed and assembled at real size, it would be as large as a football field. The team spent fifteen days on the mountain, and the combined photography time was 35 hours. Then it took two months of post-production on the 46 terabytes of the panorama, thus allowing its conversion to a more “useful” format for those of us who appreciate the final work from a computer. The main hardware consisted of a Canon EOS 70D DSLR camera, a Canon EF 400mm f/2.8 II IS lens, and a Canon Extender 2X III. Not counting the tripod, we are talking about approximately $11,000. (Editor’s note: Canon was one of the sponsors of the project.)
I imagine that the next record will demand even more aggressive specifications in the camera (the EOS 7D shoots at 20.2 megapixels) and a larger number of images. Technically, the absolute record belongs to NASA with an image of the Moon at 681 gigapixels developed with the help of LRO, but something tells me that even that mark will not take long to bite the dust.
