Multi Mega Pixel (MMP) photos with hundreds of mega pixels of resolution

Introduction

The Equipment

The Location

As of 2007, typical digital cameras for consumers, amateurs and pros offer a resolution of up to 16,7 megapixels (Canon). If you take Hasselblad's H3D-39 with the latest Kodak sensor, you will get as far as 39 mega pixels. Leaving aside a few specialty solutions, that's where the mega pixel count currently terminates. For some people however it can be challenging to get more than that, maybe even a lot more.

Just like you might have been wondering about the 72 mega pixel count for some panoramas in "Gallery 2", the principle of a multi mega pixel is quite similar. Rather than taking a single image, you could take a tripod with a suitable head, a strong tele-lens of something like 300mm and take a whole bunch of photos which you assemble later on e.g. with PTGui.

How to do it? Well, quite simple actually, but you will need a lot of patience as the whole process is a length issue. The result however will compensate you for the effort and you will have a photo with unseen details and superb image quality.

You should have a decent digital camera, particulary when you are trying to do multi mega pixel photos above 150 mega pixels. You can still give it a try with a point & shoot that got a strong tele integrated, but for reasons of lens quality, speed as well as convenience, the preferred tool is a D-SLR with at least 6 mega pixels of resolution. The more resolution your camera got, the less work you will have later on and/or the more mega pixels you will be able to archieve.

As mentioned your lens should be a good tele lens with as little distortion as possible. Depending on the number of pixels you may want to reach, more than 300 mm might be necessary. However, in order to get started, 300 mm should enable you to get hundreds of megapixels already.

A good and stable tripod with a quality head is certainly an advantage, though it probably does not have to be a proper panorama head, if the object of interest is rather far away with no image elements close to the camera position.

In order to make sure your camera sits firm and steady on the head on top of the tripod, a remote control trigger can be very useful taking into account, that a single spoiled photo of the dozens of maybe hundreds you will be taking, can ruin the entire multi mega pixel photo.

Last but not least a fully charged battery is inevitable as you will not really be able to change the battery during the session.   

Multi mega pixel photos cannot really be taken everywhere and there are some limitations on the choice of locations for a successful MMP. The reason is the time it takes between shooting the individual photos which makes it very hard to impossible capturing scenes where there is any kind of movement (people, cars, etc.). However, the further you are away from the actual scene, the better your chance to get a decent result, even with some sort of movement (as on the sample below).

Another important issue is illumination, especially the sun. If you want to get a 600 mega pixel photo with a 6 mega pixel camera, you will have to take anywhere between 120 and 150 individual photos. By the time you have taken the last photo, earth has rotated quite a bit and shades for example can be very different from what they have been like on the first photo. Try to avoid sunrises and sunsets, as the problem is worst around that time.

The timing and climate can also be very important. During a hot day in summer at bright sunlight most of us have seen the effect of terrestrial scintillation, hot air rising from the ground upwards in turbulent paths causing the human eye to register shimmering over those hote surfaces. This effect might not have quite so much of an impact on a single photo taken with a wide angle lens, but in Multi Mega Pixel photography it can be a major problem. For locations in hot regions, try to take the individual photos for the MMP in the morning before the ground heats up.

The Shooting

Stitching & Editing

Conclusion & Comments

When you are done with the choice for your location and your equipment is ready, take your time and set up the camera without rush. Patience is very important in order to avoid mistakes.

First of all, take a look at the scene and determine the four outer corners of what you actually want to get. It is well worth to go a bit beyond that with the individual images as you might have to crop the final result due to inclination of your camera, depending whether you shoot from a lower or elevated position.

Next, take your camera and look through your lens. If you have a zoom lens, you might want to determine at which focal length you want to shoot. The close you zoom in, the more individual images you will get and the higher the resolution of the final MMP.

Take a few shots in different areas of what you have chosen to become the MMP. The reason is, that you should try to find the correct exposure settings in order to avoid loosing details in shades and/or highlights.

The final and very important step before starting to shoot is to get a feeling of the sequence you will shoot and the areas of the individual images that will have to overlap in order to be able to join everything together. Be aware, particular with the rows where your camera will be vertically inclinated on your tripod's head, that the overlapping area may change with the horizontal position.

When you are ready, start shooting as shown on the drawing. Depending on light conditions and your tripod's head it might be better / more convenient to go for rows or for columns. Depending on the speed of your camera, memory card performance and your experience, you will end up being able to take 100 individual photos within less than 10 minutes. That will roughly give you a 300-400 mega pixel photo in the end.

When you get back home, transfer your images to your local harddisk. In order to join (stitch) all the images together you will need a decent computer, preferably with a lot of RAM and a lot of temporary diskspace. As a guidline, the 198 mega pixel image above, required 50 giga bytes of temporary disk space before cropping.

Well, if you got that, the next choice is for the application you may use to actually do the stitching. Nowadays there are quite a few applications that can do the job and there are even plug-ins for Photoshop you may use. For the MMPs on this site, free panorama tools and low cost PTgui have been used. PTgui is a very powerful tool using panorama tools for stitching. It is able to create extremely good cylindrical as well as spherical panoramas and it works even more accurate on joining "partial" panoramas, which is what you are actually doing here.

However, regardless of the application you use, the principle is the same among all of them. You identify points on a set of two individual images from the lot you shot, and you mark those points as "being equal" (control points). The application will then be able to join the images together. Generally, the more points you set, the more accurate the result. PTgui did most of that automatically and for the sample above, there was no need to set a single control point manually.

The last step is called blending. As there will certainly be differences in exposure for the individual images, they will need to be adjusted so that the final image has a uniform "exposure". That can either be done automatically with "Enblend" and other tools, or you could adjust each image manually which is length process.

Multi mega pixel photos are stunning because you can see details you are not used to on an ordinary photo from your camera. It is somewhat similar to Google Earth, where you have high resolution aerial/satellite images that stretch over a huge region.

Taking them however takes a lot of time and effort. The 200 mega pixel image above for example, took about 30 minutes for the actual shooting, another 20 minutes converting RAW to JPG, 1 hour calculating control points and a whopping 7 hours in calculating and blending the final output file.

The final TIFF file is 916 mb in size and it could be printed at 300 as big as 202x70 cm. At 72 dpi, size could be as big as 8.4 x 2.9 metres.

Some day a digital camera might be able to take e.g. a 200 mega pixel photo with just one shot. However, stitched multi mega pixel photos are pieces of art and if you like photography and have the patience to do them, you will certainly enjoy.