Largest Panoramic Photo in the World: How it Was Made

Photography Tips

Ever try to stitch six photos together to make a panorama? How about 52,000? That’s what photographers in London did recently to create the world’s largest panoramic photograph. The photos were taken from the BT Tower, a communications building that was designed to sway as little as possible in the wind. On the 29th floor, four cameras were set up on specialized rigs to control their movement and create a beautiful pano of London:

Here’s a few statistics on the photoshoot:

• There were six attempts before an acceptable set of photos were captured
• Four Canon 7D cameras were used, each equipped with 400mm lens and 2x teleconverter, resulting in a 1 degree angle of view
• The cameras captured nearly three terabytes of data in JPG format. RAW would have been too much data too handle.
• A 32 core computer with 256 GB of RAM was used and took 200 hours to render the photo
• Due to the heavy winds, each photo had about a 30% overlap to compensate in case the rig was shifted too much
• The completed pano equaled 320 gigapixels, about 30,000 times more resolution than a regular photo

Zoomed all the way in

Zoomed all the way out

You can explore this record breaking 320 gigapixel panoramic photo for yourself right at the BT Tower website.