September 8, 2007

13 gigapixels or bust; sketchy photogs; more

  • In Spectacle, photographers David Rockwell & Bruce Mau "celebrate the phenomenon and history of communal, awe-inspiring public performance worldwide--from the stadium to the streets, from religious festivals to political marches."  Dig the really well-chosen type treatments as well. [Via]
  • For a different kind of spectacle, see Harlem in 13 Gigapixels. Photographer Gerard Maynard & software developer Alexandre Jenny have teamed up to create a massive image of the famous New York neighborhood.  With results spanning 279,689 x 46,901 pixels, the project's raw numbers are pretty eye-popping:
    • 2,045 individual photos from a Nikon D2X
    • 21.49 GB of compressed raw data
    • 1 day for image placement and color correction
    • 46 hours of rendering on an 8-core Xeon system with 8GB of RAM
    • Results: A single 48.8 GB image stored in the Photoshop Large Document format (.PSB), converted via Zoomify & displayed through the Flash Player.
      [Via Maria Brenny]  (If this is up your alley, see previous.)
  • Ah, the 1950's, when you had to be the lookout for "corn-fed belles" hanging out of trees along the road, ready to disrobe in your U-Haul trailer.  At least that's the world conjured up by the (more than a little creepy) Glamour Photography magazine--one "designed to give the camera man a better understanding of the technical and philosophical aspects of photographing pretty girls."  Philosophy--yes, that's it. [Via]
  • Elsewhere in history, here are 50 years of a woman's life, as told by photos bought at a garage sale.  Note to self: Keep trying not to get old.
  • Clayton James Cubitt shares portraits of Hurricane Katrina survivors.  (I'm a big fan of Flash galleries in general, but in this case I think the jerky transitions distract from the subject matter.) [Via]

Posted by John Nack at 3:20 PM on September 8, 2007

Comments

Alexandre Jenny — 12:46 AM on September 10, 2007

Thanks for posting our record.

BTW : Is there plan to extend the PSB format to handle something bigger ? We are close to the limits with this picture 279000 versus 300000 ...
Another topic : we still didn't get any information on how to store our next panorama in 32bits in PSB format :) I'm sure you have hint !

[I'll ask Chris Cox for input. --J.]

Chris Cox — 8:58 PM on September 10, 2007

The PSB format dimensions can already go to 2 billion pixels.
But Photoshop CS3 is limited to 300k.

(It gets really hard to test at the upper limits -- how many exabytes of disk space do you have?)

Alexandre Jenny — 7:23 AM on September 11, 2007

We don't fill the panorama in each direction the same way : 270k x 50k. We are pretty close to the 300k limit ( but of course, not in both direction ).
BTW : yes, we have some disks ;)
Do you have my email to talk about that offline, Chris ?

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