San Francisco holiday skyline: 121 Megapixels!
This is a detailed, 121 megapixel panorama of the San Francisco holiday skyline, shot on December 28 2016. I've been working on making as sharp and as detailed as possible; you can make out exit sign lights above doors at the SFMOMA 2.4km (1.5 miles) and 555 California 3km (1.9 miles) away and individual lights on the Bay Bridge 5.5km (3.4 miles) away. Thanks very much to Florian Kainz for all of his advice to get this as good as it could be :]
You can check out the full resolution version here: www.flickr.com/photos/captin_nod/32066278265/sizes/o/
The hardware used was nothing particularly special - a Canon 7D with the cheap, standard canon 70-300mm zoom lens at 260mm. I shot individual pictures at f/11, ISO 400 with a 1 second exposure (which underexposed most things about a stop). The panorama itself is shot from 46 individual images; and each one of these images consisted of locking off the camera and taking 4 photographs. In photoshop, these are exactly aligned and median filtered to reduce noise, remove motion artifacts from moving lights and recover a little dynamic range. I'd periodically switch the camera into live view to check that the focus of the lens was sharp. The process of shooting the images - the setup, calibration, checking focus and of course actual exposures - took a little under an hour.
After stitching, the image is around 50,000 pixels across. As expected, I wasn't able to completely eliminate all the things that could contribute to softness - nailing the focus, intrinsic shaking of the tripod & camera due to things like wind, and distortion due to heat haze and atmosphere. In the original panorama, there are large parts of the image that can be downsampled, resized back up and placed back in without any significant loss in quality. This 'empty resolution' means that I could wholesale resample the image to half it's size; this also had the effect of improving the signal to noise ratio a little, reducing the noise in the final image.
For the interactive panorama on Facebook (www.facebook.com/bjoshi/posts/10154212269427423), I used a modified version of Eric Cheng's fantastic PSD templates (www.facebook.com/notes/eric-cheng/editing-360-photos-inje...) to create a 6000 pixel wide, 300-degree-wide cylindrical panorama version of the image. It requires a little manual messing around with the XMP metadata to get it exactly where I wanted it (my image is not very tall); ping me in the comments below if you want more details or help figuring it out.
For those of you that have grabbed the original image from Flickr with the intent of printing or using commercially - please don't, and buy the image or hire me instead. I shoot high quality imagery at very reasonable rates. I'm easy to find, drop me a line.
Just in case this alone doesn't deter you, in the online copies of the photograph I've hidden (in plain sight) in a range of highly offensive imagery that would be extremely embarrassing and difficult to explain to a client. Have fun trying to find it all because I guarantee you can't :]
San Francisco holiday skyline: 121 Megapixels!
This is a detailed, 121 megapixel panorama of the San Francisco holiday skyline, shot on December 28 2016. I've been working on making as sharp and as detailed as possible; you can make out exit sign lights above doors at the SFMOMA 2.4km (1.5 miles) and 555 California 3km (1.9 miles) away and individual lights on the Bay Bridge 5.5km (3.4 miles) away. Thanks very much to Florian Kainz for all of his advice to get this as good as it could be :]
You can check out the full resolution version here: www.flickr.com/photos/captin_nod/32066278265/sizes/o/
The hardware used was nothing particularly special - a Canon 7D with the cheap, standard canon 70-300mm zoom lens at 260mm. I shot individual pictures at f/11, ISO 400 with a 1 second exposure (which underexposed most things about a stop). The panorama itself is shot from 46 individual images; and each one of these images consisted of locking off the camera and taking 4 photographs. In photoshop, these are exactly aligned and median filtered to reduce noise, remove motion artifacts from moving lights and recover a little dynamic range. I'd periodically switch the camera into live view to check that the focus of the lens was sharp. The process of shooting the images - the setup, calibration, checking focus and of course actual exposures - took a little under an hour.
After stitching, the image is around 50,000 pixels across. As expected, I wasn't able to completely eliminate all the things that could contribute to softness - nailing the focus, intrinsic shaking of the tripod & camera due to things like wind, and distortion due to heat haze and atmosphere. In the original panorama, there are large parts of the image that can be downsampled, resized back up and placed back in without any significant loss in quality. This 'empty resolution' means that I could wholesale resample the image to half it's size; this also had the effect of improving the signal to noise ratio a little, reducing the noise in the final image.
For the interactive panorama on Facebook (www.facebook.com/bjoshi/posts/10154212269427423), I used a modified version of Eric Cheng's fantastic PSD templates (www.facebook.com/notes/eric-cheng/editing-360-photos-inje...) to create a 6000 pixel wide, 300-degree-wide cylindrical panorama version of the image. It requires a little manual messing around with the XMP metadata to get it exactly where I wanted it (my image is not very tall); ping me in the comments below if you want more details or help figuring it out.
For those of you that have grabbed the original image from Flickr with the intent of printing or using commercially - please don't, and buy the image or hire me instead. I shoot high quality imagery at very reasonable rates. I'm easy to find, drop me a line.
Just in case this alone doesn't deter you, in the online copies of the photograph I've hidden (in plain sight) in a range of highly offensive imagery that would be extremely embarrassing and difficult to explain to a client. Have fun trying to find it all because I guarantee you can't :]