One Stop Under

If you’ve been following photography web sites or geek blogs for a while, you’ve no doubt heard of The Gigapxl Project. These guys have built a very large camera that shoots 9″x18″ film sheets, which are then scanned to produce a 4 gigapixel image. That’s gigapixel, as in, 1000 megapixels.

The Gigapxl Project has had a good bit of media coverage lately, including a very interesting talk by Graham Flint at the Pop!Tech 2005 conference. You can listen to the talk at ITConversations. You can also read articles about the project at the Wired and Popular Science web sites.

So what’s the point of such massive photographs? They’re currently working on a project called “Portrait of America”, which aims to photograph the key sites that define each of the states of the USA and provinces of Canada. They are also working with Google to integrate their images with Google Earth, so web surfers can see the sights and explore cities all around the world.

Perhaps most exciting is the potential this technology has to record as best we can the deteriorating cultural and archaeological sites around the world for future generations:

In terms of the future, we have been much encouraged by the diversity of applications which continue to emerge. One of particular appeal relates to the documentation of cultural and archaeological sites which cannot be preserved and which inevitably will deteriorate with the passage of time. Many thousands of these sites are present around the world. Prime examples include entire cities such as Rome, Italy. In this instance, limestone structures which have stood for thousands of years have become the victims of acid rain. Stonemason’s chisel marks, until recently clear to see, have all but vanished. Only through a massive program of ultra-high-resolution documentary photography can such details be preserved for enjoyment and study by future generations.

Filed under: Equipment, Exhibitions, History

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