Invitation to Fstoppers to Join in on Discussions About Creation of Gigapixel Photos

I wanted to start this group to provide a place where photographers interested in this type of photography could come to exchange ideas and experiences about Gigapixel Photography. I have been doing Gigapixel Photography since 2011. For the past 2 years in September, I have taught a Gigapixel Panoramic Photography Workshop in Ouray, Colorado.

The photo I have attached to this post is a HDR panorama I did of Mt. Denali near Talkeetna, Alaska this past summer. The original un cropped version of this panorama consists of 39 individual HDR 42 mega-pixel images shot with Sony a7Rii at f-32, bracketed 1/4, 1/150th, & 1.0 seconds and ISO 200 using a 380mm lens yielding an image 62" x 146". The cropped image as shown is:

772 Mega-pixels
18601 x 41502 pixels
62" x138.6" 300 ppi cropped size

According to Wikipedia, a Gigapixel image is digital image bitmap composed of one billion (109) pixels (picture elements). Obviously, the attached image is not quite a gigapixel sized image. I don't hold fast to the idea that this discussion has to always be about => 1 gigapixel sized images. The discussion will center about stitched images consisting of 100's of megapixels and up.

When shooting this type of image one must overlap one image to adjacent images anywhere from 20% to 50%. Using a Canon 5Diii with 5760 x 3840, 22 Megapixel sensor and an overlap of 20%, approximately 126 images are needed to yield a 1 Gigapixel Image. Shooting this number of shots requires considerable planning, time and careful setup.

This group is intended to provide members with a place to go to ask questions and offer advise about Gigapixel Photography.