Gigapxl Project : Ultra High Resolution Large Format Photography

Chances are you are snapping photographs from a 4-6 megapixel digital camera, or maybe if you are a professional photographer, you could be using 10 megapixels high resolution camera. I am talking about 4000 Megapixels Ultra High Resolution Large Format Photography which is an integral part of the the Gigapxl Project. Amazed!

The Gigapxl Project is all about taking Ultra High Resolution (upto 4 gigapixels = 4000 Megapixels = 4 billion pixels) and Large Format Photography. The Project’s near-term goal is to compile a coast-to-coast Portrait of America; photographing her cities, parks and monuments in exquisite detail. A longer term goal is to create a world-wide archive of vanishing cultural and archaeological sites. Team members include Graham Flint, Catherine Aves and Michael T. Jones.

The Gigapxl camera captures single exposures on film with enough resolvable detail to support scanning at resolutions up to four billion pixels. Single gigapixel images are slightly larger than 44,000 x 22,000 pixels in size and four-gigapixel images are twice as wide and twice as high at 88,000 x 44,000 pixels. A 4000-megapixel print has dimensions of 10 feet by 20 feet.

“a four billion pixel, uncompressed, 16-bit per component image is a 24 gigabyte data file. Moving, copying, editing, processing, and printing files of this scale strains the boundaries of even the most robust image processing tools. Having accomplished such tasks for more than one hundred images certainly makes us feel that we are digital photographers even though we use film in the camera.”

Check out the growing Image gallery of the Gigapxl project. You can download high resolution wallpapers upto 1920 pxl from the gallery. All images are copyright protected by The Gigapxl Project and its photographers and any reuse or reproduction, in any medium, other than for personal viewing and sharing is prohibited.

The Gigapxl Project started in the fall of 2000, and the attempt is on to assemble an ultra-high-resolution portrait of America. Over 1200 images have been snapped. Keep tracking it.