BF2S Forums 1,474-Megapixel Photo during President Obama’s Inauguration!!! OMG

Wow.

I covered my first inauguration and what an inauguration it was.

Barack Obama became the 44th President of the United States in a ceremony on the west front of the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, DC.

Before Tuesday, I had photographed five presidents and covered big events including the Olympics, the Super Bowl, and concerts like Live 8 and Live Earth.

But this one was the biggest.

It deserved a big photo.

I made a panoramic image showing the nearly two million people who watched President Obama’s inaugural address. To do so, I clamped a Gigapan Imager to the railing on the north media platform about six feet from my photo position. The Gigapan is a robotic camera mount that allows me to take multiple images and stitch them together, creating a massive image file.

My final photo is made up of 220 Canon G10 images and the file is 59,783 X 24,658 pixels or 1,474 megapixels. It took more than six and a half hours for the Gigapan software to put together all of the images on my Macbook Pro and the completed TIF file is almost 2 gigabytes.

Use the controls to zoom and pan around the photo. You can also double click to zoom in and double click again to get even closer.