Gigapixel Art and Photography

There seems to be at bit of a buzz going around at the moment about gigapixel photography. This is digital photography where the detail or resolution is so high that the number of pixels used to make up the image is in execss of a billion – one thousand megapixels. If such numbers don’t mean anything to you then it might help to say that such images occupy in excess of four CDs, or you might fit one of them on a standard DVD. The average digital camera is currently about five megapixels – so in excess of two hundred of such images would go to make a single gigapixel image.

Printed out they look stunning, and they require special zooming technology for you to be able to see them on the web.

I have being doing gigapixel art and photography since 2003, indeed some of my pictures run into several gigapixels in size. There is a big difference between gigapixel art and gigapixel photography though. Whereas you can get a camera to take a gigapixel image at the press of a button – or you can get stitching software to fit dozens or hundreds of smaller images together to form one larger composite

(e.g. work in progress of photograph of shops)

(Click on image to zoom in…)

– this bears no resemblance to the effort involved in gigapixel art. The work involved in creating, editing, and compositing dozens of photographs, all the freehand work on such large files, and the colour proofing – typically runs in to several hundred hours for me – using the most powerful computer equipment. And that is before doing anything creative with it…

E.G. zoom in to the centre to see the flying doves?
(Click on image to zoom in…)

I hope this puts to bed the myth that digital art is quick and easy – or certainly gigapixel art definitely isn’t!

Just for the record, gigapixel photography is nothing new really. In terms of film photography, large format cameras, like my 10″ x 8″ (this is the actual size of the usable part of the transparency or negative) Sinar P2, took/take the equivalent of gigapixel photographs all the time. Indeed I have a scanner that can scan up to 18″ x 13″ at 10000 dpi (dots per inch). A 10″ x 8″ transparency or negative scanned at this resolution equates to 100,000 x 80,000 pixels = 8,000,000,000 pixels of information. This is 8 thousand million pixels or 8 gigapixels… (For those of you who think in terms of bits and bytes, this is twenty-four (24) gigabytes at 8 bits per colour, or forty-eight (48) gigabytes at 16 bits per colour).

As an artist I am thrilled and daunted at the same time about the prospect of being in control of well in excess of a thousand megapixels. However, the creative freedom this level of control gives is very liberating…

You can see zoomable examples of my work either from links on this blog or on my web site, or at various exhibitions.