Gigapixel Macro

Up until now, I have only heard of and seen Gigapixel panoramas. Gigapixel panoramas are basically a stitch and combination of multiple individual photographs. Gigapixel panoramas allows you to zoom in to very detailed areas of a scene.

According to Wikipedia, current methods are to use mosaics of high resolution digital images or by using very large films and then scanned with a very high resolution scanner. If you have not seen one before here are a few links to some examples. One good example is Google Earth.

GigaPixel360


Vancouver GigaPixel Project


360 Gigapixel London


Macro Photography

Macro photography is a genre of photography of photographing  things extremely close-up. Popular items for macro photography are insects, plants/flowers, water droplets etc. In macro photography, the depth-of-field (area in focus) becomes very shallow/thin hence. Take a look at the following picture as an example.

Macro shot of the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 lens.

From the picture, you should be able to tell where the focus plane is which is close to the '50'. Areas beyond the '50' is basically out of focus.

In order to achieve everything in focus I could have increase the depth-of-field by using a very small aperture or use a method called focus stacking. I will not be going into details of the methods especially focus stacking as I have no experiencing in doing it. Focus stacking involves taking multiple photos with different areas in focus and then blending/merging all of the photos together.

Back to gigapixel macro, this company Gigamacro makes rigs for creating the gigapixel macro photo.

The rig is automated, fitted with a DSLR and a macro lens. Not sure why in the video/exhibition he stated that it is a macro lens, but in fact it is actually not a macro lens (it should be on the actual rig). That picture of the cicada is made up of 6500 shots! I really wonder how long and what kind of computing power is required to stitch and merge all of the photos together. The company also provides a web-app to explore the photographs in tiles as used in Google Earth/Maps.

It is a really interesting thing though especially when there is only so much we can see with our eyes.