Tom Munnecke’s Eclectica

Thanks to a tip from Charles Smith a while back, I’ve discovered the Gigapan.org site, that helps folks post very large scale mosaics. It’s a fascinating process, and opens up a whole new way of doing photography. It also seems to be contagious. Three friends have seen my panos and have now begun their own exploration.

Above is a mosaic I took of the Copper Canyon in Northern Mexico last month. I shot 21 handheld individual photos, then stitched them together with Photoshop CS3. (using the Photomerge feature with both auto align and autoblend options turned on.)

I then saved the image as a TIFF, and uploaded it to Gigapan. Gigapan allows users to pan and zoom through the image, as well as take “snapshots” of the larger image.

This can take up a tremendous amount of compute time and memory. A 1 gb image can chew up 10gb of disk space while Photoshop is doing its magic.

Here are all of my panoramas