With the advent of the latest modern digital cameras with powerful lenses, super fast computers and advanced photo imaging technologies, professionals have the ability to take highly detailed photographs. What do we mean by “detailed” - gigapixel photos?.
Let's explain with an example. Have you seen good photographs taken, say, with a 10 megapixel camera? Isn't it a very large and detailed photograph? But the largest photo in the world is only 1500 times larger than this photo.
Here is a piece from the largest photo in the world. We marked with an arrow a man running along the beach.
"The biggest photo"
Do you see? Why not? . There he is! Let's take a closer look.
"The biggest photo"
What a pity that the air in large cities is not so clean... A little gray at maximum magnification.
How does it all work? Yes, almost without human intervention. We take a special device for taking gigapixel photographs - EPIC, take a professional camera with a very powerful lens, and connect it to this device. Then we set the necessary shooting parameters and enjoy a positive life while the equipment works.
"The biggest photo"
We decided to give this place not to the tenth largest photograph in the world. And just a beautiful panorama with insects. Of course there are photographs 100 times larger. There are only 23 photos here, but look at the detail!
The panorama was made as part of the work to digitize the collection of the North Carolina State Insect Museum
By the way, they forgot to say. To view you need Flash player. Or download the browser Google Chrome, it already has this thing built in
"The biggest photo"
In September 2009, the site appeared - www.paris-26-gigapixels.com - the most interactive site with such a large gigapixel photo panorama. Very clear resolution, 2346 photographs describing the French capital and its famous monuments
8th place 43.9 Gigapixels - photo panorama of the backyard
"The biggest photo"
The photographs were taken in the village of Round Lake (Illinois) on August 22, 2010. The total number of images was 4048. A Canon 7D camera and a 400mm lens were used for photography. Approximate shooting time 2 hours and processing time 7 days
7th place. 44.8 Gigapixels - photo panorama of the city of Dubai
"The biggest photo"
Dubai is the largest city in the United Arab Emirates. To make this photo panorama, the author had to work for more than three hours in 37 degree heat, since the entrance to the construction site was only accessible at this time. The total number of photographs is 4250. A Canon 7D camera and a 100-400mm lens were used.
6th place. 47 Gigapixels - photo panorama of the city of Marburg.
"The biggest photo"
Marburg is a university town with a population of approximately 78 thousand. The photo was taken from a tower at a height of 36 meters from the ground. I used a Nikon D300 camera and a Sigma 50-500mm lens. A gigapixel photo panorama consists of 5,000 photographs, each of which is 12.3 megapixels. The shooting time was 3 hours 27 minutes. The total amount of occupied information on the hard drive is 53.8 GB
5th place. 50 Gigapixels - photo panorama of Vienna - the capital of Austria
"The biggest photo"
The name of the project is 70 billion pixels of Budapest - the capital of Hungary. A very colorful photo frame made in 2010. It’s immediately obvious that they were created for the capital. The photographs were taken over 4 days. The total number of photographs is about 20 thousand.
We present to your attention our selection of the largest photographs in the world. To view them you will need FlashPlayer. You can download it separately or use the Google Chrome browser.
Photopanorama of the Moon - 681 Gpc.
The absolute champion in the size of composite photographs is NASA. In 2014, the agency published a 681-gigapixel panorama of the Moon. On June 18, 2009, NASA launched the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) to image the lunar surface and collect measurements of potential future landing sites, as well as for scientific purposes.
You can view the panorama on the website.
Photopanorama of Mont Blanc - 365 Gpc.
At the end of 2014, an international team of professional photographers led by Filippo Blennini compiled a 360-degree panorama of the mountain range between France and Italy - Mont Blanc, the second highest mountain in Europe after Elbrus.
It consists of 70 thousand photographs! Photos taken with a Canon EOS 70D camera with a Canon EF 400mm f/2.8 II IS telephoto lens and a Canon Extender 2X III. The creators of the giant panorama claim that if printed on paper, it would be the size of a football field. To date, this is the largest gigapixel photograph taken on earth.
You can view the panorama on the project website.
Photopanorama of London - 320 Gpc.
The panorama was compiled from 48,640 individual images taken with four Canon 7D cameras and posted online in February 2013. Preparation for the experiment took several months, and filming took place over four days. The pictures were taken by British Telecom from the top of the BT Tower, located in central London on the north bank of the Thames. Photographed by 360cities.net panoramic photography experts Jeffrey Martin, Holger Schulze and Tom Mills.
You can view the panorama on the website.
Photopanorama of Rio de Janeiro - 152.4 Gpc.
The panorama was taken on July 20, 2010 and consists of 12,238 photographs. Uploading the final image to gigapan.org took the author almost three months!
You can view the panorama on the website.
Photopanorama of Tokyo - 150 Gpc.Fo
The author of the panorama is Jeffrey Martin, founder of the website 360cities.net. The panorama was created from 10 thousand different photographs taken from the observation deck of the Tokyo Tower television tower. When creating it, the photographer used a Canon EOS 7D DSLR and a Clauss Rodeon robotic machine. It took two days to obtain 10 thousand frames, and three months to combine them into one panorama.
You can view the panorama on the website.
Photopanorama of the Arches National Park - 77.9 Gpc.
The author of the panorama is Alfred Zhao. "Arches" is a national park located in the United States, Utah. There are more than two thousand arches formed by nature from sandstone. Creating the panorama required 10 days of processing, 6 TB of free hard drive space, and two days of uploading the final image to the website. The photo was taken in September 2010.
You can view the panorama on the website.
Photopanorama of Budapest - 70 Gpc.
In 2010, a team of enthusiasts, sponsored by Epson, Microsoft and Sony, created the largest 360-degree panoramic photograph in the world at that time. The project was called “70 billion pixels of Budapest”. The 70-gigapixel photo was taken over four days from the city's 100-year-old observation tower. The panorama was more than 590 thousand pixels wide and 121 thousand pixels high, and the total number of pictures was about 20 thousand. Unfortunately, the link to it does not work now.
Photopanorama on Mount Corcovado - 67 Gpc.
This photograph was taken on Mount Corcovado in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where the Christ the Redeemer statue is located. The photo panorama was taken in July 2010 and was created from 6223 frames.
You can view the panorama on the website.
Photopanorama of Vienna - 50 Gpc.
A gigapixel photo panorama of the Austrian capital Vienna was created in the summer of 2010. It took 3,600 shots to make, but the result was worth it.
You can view the panorama on the website.
Photopanorama of Marburg - 47 Gpk.
Marburg is a university town with a population of about 78 thousand people. The panorama required 5 thousand photographs, which were taken with a D300 Nikon camera with a Sigma 50–500 mm lens from a 36-meter-high tower. Each of the photographs has a size of 12.3 megapixels. It took the author 3 hours and 27 minutes to shoot, and the total amount of information he received took up 53.8 GB on the hard drive.
You can view the panorama on the website.
Milky Way - 46 Gpc.
For five years, a group of astronomers from the Ruhr University, using an observatory located in the Chilean Atacama Desert, monitored our galaxy and created a giant photograph of 46 billion pixels from images of the Milky Way. The image weighs 194 GB.
You can view the panorama on the website.
Photopanorama of Dubai - 44.8 Gpc.
The author of the panorama is Gerald Donovan. Dubai is the largest city in the United Arab Emirates. To create the panorama, a Canon 7D camera with a 100–400 mm lens was used. The author worked for more than three hours in 37-degree heat and took 4,250 photographs.
You can view the panorama on the website.
Photo panorama of the backyard - 43.9 Gpc.
The 4,048 photographs for the panorama were taken on August 22, 2010 in the village of Round Lake in Illinois, USA. The author, Alfred Zhao, used a Canon 7D camera with a 400 mm lens. It took two hours to shoot, but about a week to process the photos.
You can view the panorama on the website.
Photopanorama of Paris - 26 Gpk.
The author of the panorama is Martin Loyer. At the end of 2009, an interactive site www.paris-26-gigapixels.com appeared on the Internet, which contains a huge gigapixel photo panorama of Paris with very clear resolution, consisting of 2346 photographs. It will allow you to immerse yourself in the image of this city and see its sights without leaving the house.
Photographer Alfred Zhao took largest photo in the world— 272 gigapixel panorama of Shanghai on a Canon 7D camera, using a special GigaPan EPIC Pro mount and a 400mm lens with 2x tele attachments. The shoot began around 8:30 a.m. and ended just before sunset, when the photographer had already taken 12,000 photos. It took a whole month to stitch together the photo and get the final file weighing 1.09 TB.
Now Zhao holds the record as an author largest digital photograph in the world, although according to him this is not the end of his panoramic travels, but rather “a new beginning that challenges the endless process. New photos will definitely appear. It's only a matter of time".
Interestingly, the fight for the title of author of the largest digital photograph has broken out in earnest. Almost simultaneously with the panorama of Shanghai, a 111 gigapixel panorama of Seville was also published, which, however, did not reach the record. In general, in 2009-2010. new records appeared almost every month.
The author of one of them in 2009. was Holger Schulze, who shot a 26-gigapixel panorama of the city of Dresden, Germany. He shot a series of 1,655 images with his Canon EOS 5D Mark II. It took a computer with 16 processors and 48GB of RAM about 94 hours to process and combine all the RAW files. The resulting 26-gigapixel panorama clearly shows details such as a person looking out of a hotel window or people walking in a park. 
And in a 45 gigapixel photograph of Dubai, a close-up view even shows a broken window taped over on one of the floors of the Burj Khalifa (at that time called Burj Dubai).
I think we won’t have to wait long for new records, because such photographs have become popular, the equipment has become cheaper, and most importantly, there is a service for uploading and distributing the resulting gigopanoramas on the Internet, but how else can you show people terabyte files? 🙂
The laurels of the largest photograph in the world taken from Earth now belong to the work of Filippo Blengini. The international team he led managed to take a 365-gigapixel photograph depicting the highest mountain in Europe - Mont Blanc. You can see the record-breaking panoramic photograph at this link.
In order to capture in detail the highest point of the Old World (4808 meters), the Italian photographer and his team of five people had to take only pictures for 35 hours. To compile the “final portrait” of Mont Blanc, they needed to combine 70,000 frames, and it took two months to process 46 terabytes of data. As a result, Filippo received the largest photograph in the world to date: if it was printed at a density of 300 dpi, the image area would be comparable to the area of a football field. When you zoom in on a photo, you can see in detail objects in the distance that are completely invisible during normal viewing.
Until now, the world's largest photograph was a 320-gigapixel panorama of London taken from the BT Tower in 2013. NASA has an even more impressive 681 gigapixel image, but it shows the surface of the Moon and was taken using NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. For this reason, it is not included in the ranking of the largest “earthly” photographs.
As for Filippo Blengini's team, they used the following photographic equipment: Canon EF 400 mm f/2.8 II IS, Canon 70D DSLR and Canon Extender 2X III with a special robotic mount.
Interesting facts about the work done can be found in the following infographics:
And this is how the filming itself went:
With the advent of the latest modern digital cameras with powerful lenses, super fast computers and advanced photo processing technologies, professionals have the ability to take highly detailed photographs. What do we mean by "detailed" - gigapixel photos?.
Let's explain with an example. Have you seen good photographs taken, say, with a 10 megapixel camera? Isn't it a very large and detailed photograph? But the largest photograph in the world is only 1500 times larger than this photograph.
Here's a piece from the very biggest photography in the world. We marked with an arrow a man running along the beach. 
Do you see? Why not? :-). There he is! Let's take a closer look. 
What a pity that the air in large cities is not so clean... A little gray at maximum magnification.
How does it all work? Yes, almost without human intervention. A special device is taken for shooting gigapixel photos- EPIC, we take a professional camera with a very powerful lens and connect it to this device. Then we set the necessary shooting parameters and enjoy while the equipment works. 
True, then you will have to work hard and put together a large panorama from these photographs, but that’s another story ;-).
So: Top largest photographs in the world. Let's start in descending order
10th place. 0.2 Gigapixel - Insects 
We decided to give this place not to the tenth largest photograph in the world. And just a beautiful panorama with insects. Of course there are photographs 100 times larger. There are only 23 photos here, but look at the detail!
The panorama was made as part of the work to digitize the collection of the North Carolina State Insect Museum
By the way, they forgot to say. To view you need Flash player. Or download the browser Google Chrome, it already has this thing built in
9th place. 26 Gigapixels - photo panorama of Paris 
In September 2009, the site appeared - www.paris-26-gigapixels.com - the most interactive site with such a large gigapixel photo panorama. Very clear resolution, 2346 photographs describing the French capital and its famous monuments
8th place 43.9 Gigapixels - backyard photo panorama 
The photographs were taken in the village of Round Lake (Illinois) on August 22, 2010. The total number of images was 4048. A Canon 7D camera and a 400mm lens were used for photography. Approximate shooting time 2 hours and processing time 7 days
7th place. 44.8 Gigapixels - photo panorama of the city of Dubai 
Dubai is the largest city in the United Arab Emirates. To make this photo panorama, the author had to work for more than three hours in 37 degree heat, since the entrance to the construction site was only accessible at this time. The total number of photographs is 4250. A Canon 7D camera and a 100-400mm lens were used. If you want, you can watch a three-minute video about the climb to the location and the photo shoot itself.
6th place. 47 Gigapixels - photo panorama of the city of Marburg. 
Marburg is a university town with a population of approximately 78 thousand. The photo was taken from a tower at a height of 36 meters from the ground. I used a Nikon D300 camera and a Sigma 50-500mm lens. A gigapixel photo panorama consists of 5,000 photographs, each of which is 12.3 megapixels. The shooting time was 3 hours 27 minutes. The total amount of occupied information on the hard drive is 53.8 GB
5th place. 50 Gigapixels - photo panorama of Vienna - the capital of Austria 
Created in July 2010. This panorama required 3600 photographs
4th place. 67 Gigapixels - photo panorama taken on Mount Corcovado. 
On this mountain there is a statue of Christ the Redeemer. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The author writes that 6223 photographs were needed. Made in July 2010.
3rd place. 70 Gigapixels - all-round panorama of Budapest 
The name of the project is 70 billion pixels of Budapest, the capital of Hungary. A very colorful photo frame made in 2010. It’s immediately obvious that they were created for the capital. The photographs were taken over 4 days. The total number of photographs is about 20 thousand.
2nd place. 77.9 Gigapixels - panorama of the Arches National Park. 
This is a US national park located in the state of Utah. The park contains more than 2,000 natural arches formed from sandstone. To create the photo, it took 6 terabytes of free hard drive space, 10 days of processing and 50 hours of uploading the final image to the website.
1 place. 152.4 Gigapixels - panorama of Rio de Janeiro. 
Created by the author whose work is ranked 4th. It took 12,238 photos to create this frame. The date of photography was July 20, 2010. It took the author almost 3 months to process and upload the final image to the Gigapan.org website
These are the kinds of large photographs in tens of gigapixels that professional photographers produce. I hope, dear friends, that you liked this material. Stay with us;-)
In a whisper: By the way, if you are interested in creating such gigapixel panoramas, then know that EPIC Pro costs only $895
