Gigarama Photography

 

Stitching Technology Used to Create My Gigapixel Fine Art Photography

My photos’ record-setting resolutions are achieved by seamlessly stitching together 100’s or 1,000’s individual images of a scene. As illustrated below, each individual image is only a small section of the scene and are typically 45 megapixels in size. Over the past 6 years I have perfected the techniques needed to do focus bracketing and stacking of sets of images to provide ultimate Depth of Field. Each 45 megapixel image that gets stitched into the final image may consist of 3 to 50 images focused in steps from the nearest object to the furtherest object in the scene. I then blend these 3 to 50 images together to create a finished image that is perfectly in focus throughout the image. After all the images are stitched together, the result is a photo of the entire scene with a resolution that can be 1.0 to 8 gigapixels. (A 1 gigapixel image is 1,000 megapixels.)

As a side note: Many photo editing programs such as Photoshop, Topaz AI and others all have capability to “Enlarge” images. What these programs do is utilize AI (I like to call it Artificial Ignorance) to create additional pixels in between the original pixels. The program makes a guess as to the luminance and color these new pixels should be and assigns the estimated values to the new pixels. The result is an image that has an out of focus or fuzzy appearance. It may look OK from 8-10 ft. but if you get up close it looks bad. This method is used by virtually all of the wall mural companies to enlarge standard resolution photos to fit a full sized wall. I NEVER use this type of method to make my photos. All of the pixels in my photos are real coming directly from the camera just as it captured God’s magnificent Creation.

The Gigapixel Difference

The following graphic illustrates how much bigger a multi gigapixel image is than a standard photo. All of these sizes are based on a 300ppi (pixels per inch) resolution. The visual resolution of the human eye is about 1 arc minute. At a viewing distance of 20″, that translates to about 170 dpi (or pixels-per-inch / PPI). If you want to lean in closer, say to 10″, and still not see the pixels, then you would need to double that resolution to 340ppi. What this translates to is, if you were to stand 1 foot away from one of our 300ppi wall mural photos, you could not perceive any pixelization. Some online wall mural sites will try to tell you that they can make wall murals from a cell phone photo. This is flat out false. Even the newest iPhone 14 can not take a photo that can be blown up 45x to typical full height wall mural. It will be fuzzy and look out of focus.

 

This graphic shows the size differences between typical photos shot with common DSLR cameras and our Gigapixel Photography images when printed at 300ppi.

A 22 megapixel intermediate level DSLR camera would yield a 12.8 in. X 19.2 in. print when printed at 300ppi. A top of the line 45 megapixel DSLR would allow one to print up to 18.2 in. X 27.3 in. The latest iPhone 14 Pro has a 48 megapixel resolution but lacks the quality lens available for top of the line DSLR’s.

One of our 1.0 Gigapixel images on the other hand can be printed at 86.6 in. X 130 in. at 300ppi. This is 45 times the resolution of the 22 megapixel image. Several of my images are 5 Gigapixels (237 times the resolution of the 22 megapixel image) or larger and can be printed at 16 ft. x 24 ft. at 300ppi. (32 ft. x 48 ft. at 150ppi)

No AI involved, ever! — I do NOT use any AI to generate my images. Only dust spot removal, noise reduction and sharpening methods are used to clean up and edit my images. In my photography I strive to reproduce a scene as accurately as possible, to look exactly as God choose to display His Creation at the time I was shooting it.

How Do We Achieve Gigapixel Resolution?

Our Gigapixel photography Wall Mural photos are a combination of anywhere from 50 to over 9600 individual shots stitched together to form a final image that can measure to over 15 feet high and 50 feet long at 300 ppi resolution.It starts with a photographer that has a good eye, years of experience and tons of patience. Any good Landscape Photographer spends a significant amount of time scouting locations, calculating the best time of day for best lighting and planning his shoot for the best angle, along with what foreground, mid-ground and background to include. Weather, time of year and time of day are all important factors. Gigapixel photography adds a great deal of complexity to obtaining a high quality photograph. Getting that sunrise or sunset shot often entails getting up hours before sunrise to be on location for the sunrise. Setting up complicated gear in the dark can be challenging. I have been doing Landscape photography for over 60 years. Over the past 15 years I have developed a unique process of creating my gigapixel images resulting in stunning high resolution wall mural sized photos, some exceeding 8 gigapixels, that are among the highest resolution wall murals in the world.

“The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it.” Ansel Adams

Top of the line high megapixel cameras, sturdy tripods and panoramic heads are needed.

These days, I typically shoot with a 45 megapixel Canon R5 camera teamed up with a Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 lens or a Canon 300mm f/4 lens. The camera is mounted to a Nodal Ninja M2 Panoramic head. This all gets attached to an extra sturdy tripod. Altogether this adds up to about 40 pounds in my camera bag/backpack. Definitely a load if your hiking up a steep trail to your targeted location. The photographer has to have intimate knowledge of how to operate all of his gear. When shooting a sunset he can’t afford to be fiddling around trying to get the right settings for the quickly changing light. A thorough understanding of the relationships between f-stops, focal distances, Depth of Field and Hyper-Focal Distances are required to get the optimum shot.

A Super powerful computer with State-of-the-Art CPU & GPU, vast amounts of memory and storage is required.

Over the years I have built several of my own custom computer systems specifically designed for processing these types of images. Thankfully, my life’s career as an electronic engineer gave me the knowledge of what was needed to build such a machine. In April of 2023 I upgraded to latest state of the art hardware and I am now running a 13th Generation Raptor Lake Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-13900K 24 Core, 32 thread CPU, (tauted by Intel as ‘world’s fastest desktop processor ‘ as of Sept. 2022) overclocked at 5.8 GHz cooled with an ENERMAX LIQMAX III water cooling system. The ASUS ProART Z790 Creator Motherboard is populated with 128 Gigabytes of DDR5 memory. The system includes an ASUS GEFORCE RTX 4070 Ti GPU video card. I have a 2 TB SSD as the primary hard drive, a 1 TB SSD and a 4TB SSD for use as a scratch drives. The system has 12 hard drives for a total of approximately 50TB of online storage. As backup I run a Synology DS1821+ 8 bay NAS array with 76.8 TB of storage capacity. In addition I maintain a BackBlaze cloud backup of all the hard drives in the system.

Why Does Gigapixel Photography Result in Superior Looking Wall Murals?

There are numerous online suppliers of Wall Murals. The majority of photos that are used to make these murals are derived from a single image shot with a digital camera or even a cell phone. These low resolution images are then “up-sized” using various photo editing software. When an image is up-sized, the software creates additional pixels to fill in the gaps between the original pixels. The software analyzes the surrounding pixels and using special algorithms making a guess as to the color the new pixels should be. These days, these programs use AI (I like to call it Artificial Ignorance.) to make the guesses regarding pixel colors. For example, to up-size a typical 3840 x 5760 pixel, 22 megapixel photo to an 8 ft. x 12 ft. 300ppi wall mural requires that the image consist of 92.8% of the pixels generated by the AI algorithm being “fake” computer generated pixels. The result is a muddy out of focus looking image. These AI generated up-sized images just cannot compare to true gigapixel photography. As the old saying goes, “Garbage In – Garbage Out”.

The AI generated image may look “OK” when viewed from more than 8 ft. away from the mural. Our Gigapixel Photography Wall Murals can be viewed from less than 2 ft. and have the appearance of a high quality photograph.

Up the Learning Curve

Refined over years of practice and experimentation, I have perfected every step of the gigapixel photo creation process. Many of my first efforts were met with frustration and 100’s of megabytes used up on my hard drive. I quickly discovered that all the details of making sure exposure, focus, composition are all perfect for a single image were multiplied by the fact that now I had to have 50-100 images all perfect. However, after many failed attempts I have refined the knowledge and techniques needed to be able to produce multi-gigapixel images that capture our Creator’s handiwork in a way that is worthy of Him. These days I have perfected the ability to capture Focus Stacked images that can involve over 9,000 focus bracketed images yielding finished images up to 6.5 Gigapixels and larger. I invite you to view them and enjoy some our Creator’s beauty He made for our enjoyment.

Location Scouting & Image Pre-Visualization

Every photo starts with a great deal of location scouting and brainstorming. For any given subject, there are countless different angles, perspectives, and conditions to consider. I plan for a time to shoot the photo with a keen awareness of how the scene changes depending on the weather, the time of day, and the time of year. Even small changes in lighting, timing, or conditions can dramatically alter the mood of a scene. I have been known to spend hours on Google Earth and Photo Pills researching the best time of the year and time of day to shoot a particular location. The rest of the process is merely working to create the final image I’ve already visualized in my mind.

Meticulous Attention to Exposure Settings

Exposing the matrix of images that will be stitched together into the final gigapixel photo can take anywhere from a few minutes to over a hour. On the other hand, sunrise and sunset shots have only a 3-5 minute window if your trying to capture the Alpen Glow on the mountain peaks. Unlike traditional photographs, a gigapixel photo’s exceptional resolution demands the utmost attention to detail. This style of photography demands that I calculate the hyper-focal distance and use a range finder to identify an object at the hyper-focal distance to focus on. Or, if I have nearby objects in the foreground I have to setup for focus bracketing to assure I will have the sharpest possible image. I have to account for the direction of moving objects such as clouds to ensure they’re portrayed accurately and/or do not affect lighting in the scene. Scenes like the one above have huge dynamic range of light vs dark. Intimate knowledge of the inner workings of camera’s electronics is required to avoid over or under exposure in the light and dark areas. I use ETTR (Expose to the Right) techniques to make maximun use of my camera’s dynamic range. And finally physically locking my ISO, shutter speed and aperture to guarantee exactly identical exposure characteristics for every image.