An Eye for Detail!

Those who follow my blog know how I love 360º panoramas. They are such fun (and challenging) to shoot and build. Jeffery Martin, one of the founders at 360Cities is Mr. Pano. I can't imagine how difficult this pano was to create and am confident that his brief set of answers below belies the difficulty and challenge of his accomplishment! (I certainly couldn't have done such a thing, even with a robotic arm.)

You've got to check it out. The level of detail in this image goes way beyond astounding. Click the photo above and zoom in and around. Check out the people sitting in the distant park. Apparently Jeffery will have a treasure hunt related to the pano, with a $1,000 prize, and started releasing a clue a day for 30 days.

How did you create this panorama? I used a 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. All together, 40 gigabytes of images were shot. These images were then stitched together using PTGui. The resulting panorama was adjusted for color, contrast, sharpness, etc. in Photoshop. Afterwards, the image was cut into lots of ‘tiles’ and uploaded to our server. When you view the image online, you only load a few of these ‘tiles’ at one time.

How long did you spend stitching this panorama? Between loading the initial raw files into the computer, and having the panorama stitched, it took about a week. It took 3 additional weeks to fine-tune the image.

What kind of computer did you use? I used a four year-old windows PC with two single-core 3ghz xeon processors and 8GB of RAM. After a week of frustration, I also bought an SSD, which helped to speed up some tasks a bit. If I will make this image again, I will buy a new computer.

What is dimension of this panorama, and size it takes on disk? 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.

Link to the panorama

(Via Prague 18 Gigapixels – How was it made? «360 Cities Official Blog.)