An enterprising photographer took the historic occasion to break out some new tech and make an amazing Panoramic photo of the Inauguration.
I made a panoramic image showing the nearly two million people who watched President Obama’s inaugural address. To do so, I clamped a Gigapan Imager to the railing on the north media platform about six feet from my photo position. The Gigapan is a robotic camera mount that allows me to take multiple images and stitch them together, creating a massive image file.
My final photo is made up of 220 Canon G10 images and the file is 59,783 X 24,658 pixels or 1,474 megapixels. It took more than six and a half hours for the Gigapan software to put together all of the images on my Macbook Pro and the completed TIF file is almost 2 gigabytes.
Some fun details:
- See the guy behind Obama fiddling with his iPhone during the oath
- Read the sheet music of the singers
- See the facial expressions of all the VIP guiests
Update 1/27/09:
See the image, with a nice interactive pan/zoom interface, on GigaPan’s website here.
