14 DAY TRIAL // Gerard Maynard, a photographer and painter from New York, United States, has managed to obtain a 17-gigapixel photography of the Yosemite National Park, creating, according to his own words, the most impressive available panorama ever stitched together. The artist, formerly known for his photographic description of Harlem, used over 2,000 standalone pictures of the landmark, which he took himself for this super-high resolution product.
As Maynard shares, “What this allows someone to do is fully immerse themselves into the work and discover. You throw away issues of taste and replace them with actually finding things.” In order to do the job, he actually had to enhance an ancient “PixOrb” motorized tripod head developed by the Peace River Studios, which allows for panoramic and spherical photographing. Maynard was conducting work as a part of the large Yosemite Extreme Panoramic Imaging Project.
The project was initiated last summer as a collaboration between Greg Stock, a Yosemite National Park geologist, and xRez Studios, and it implies building a high-detail comprehensive photograph of the walls of the valley. This could be used as a snapshot frozen in time, presenting the current conditions of the valley and serving as a reference point for future surveys on the constant rockfall events. Furthermore, the image could come in handy in search and rescue activities in the park, by providing a detailed configuration of the respective area prior to the actual operations.
The image accompanying this article shows the portion that represents Yosemite National Park's Glacier Point. The final image is as large as 96.5 gigabytes, which involved quite much in terms of computing strength. Maynard explains that, “I have a bunch of RAID systems, so I'm moving data at about 300 MB [per] second. It takes about 45 minutes to an hour just for one of the large images to load into Photoshop. With a conventional drive, it'd take about two to three hours.”