Tommy and I were talking yesterday about how unrealistic it is when the detectives on a TV show zoom in to photographs and the pictures just keep getting clearer. You see it on shows like CSI or anywhere that it might be a convenient plot device to have a security camera image of a perp. His face is blurry, but never fear! “Let me just enhance it a little…and voila!” Anyone who has ever tried to enlarge a digital picture knows how ridiculous that is.
Well with a fancy setup, a picture like that is possible. Go here and zoom around. You can zoom in to great detail around the picture. This is how it was done:
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.
I’m still looking for Waldo.






