Here's a link to a company which offers a very cool product (or rather, multiple products of the same type) designed to automate the process of producing multiple digital photos which can then be stitched together with special software in order to produce photo files which can be enlarged to enormous sizes. The Gigapan Epic (for point & shoot cameras) and Gigapan Epic 100 (for DSLR cameras) are robotic camera mounts which automatically move the camera from position to position and then take photos --- even thousands of photos! --- which are subsequently stitched together into a single high-resolution image.
Potentially, such a system could also be very useful for turning reasonably affordable DLSR cameras into repro cameras for producing giclee and photo reproductions from large paintings or even outdoor murals. To say nothing of landscape photos, city skylines, etc.
2 comments:
The Gigapan is certainly a useful tool. My classmates and I at Rutgers University have used a Gigapan to capture large portions of our campus in large highly detailed panoramic images. If you're interested you can see our results on our website: http://whereru.rutgers.edu/
The image from the basketball court, at http://whereru.rutgers.edu/, answers one of the questions I had about the unit. It had occurred to me that images in which subjects moved around during the period in which the photos were being taken might appear to be blurry, or might even look like partial "ghost" images.
Sure enough, zooming in on the basketball image reveals that I was correct.
In short, the Gigapan is probably better for taking photos of subjects which aren't likely to move much from one shot to the next. Scenic landscape shots or city skylines or images of large paintings or murals would all work well, I suspect. The more people there are in any given composite shot, and the more individual photos there are in the overall composite image, the more likely it is that some of the people in the photo will appear as mere blurs, or even that they won't appear in the photos at all (if they're moving across the field of view in a direction which is opposite the direction in which the camera is being robotically moved). Ditto for animals, cars in motion, etc.
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