A View from the Back Bay

My name is Skip Pile, living in Boston and Nantucket Island and generally watching closely from a distance.

A Beautiful 2GB Panoramic Photo of Obama’s Inauguration Speech

Photographer David Bergman made a panoramic image showing the nearly two million people who watched President Obama’s inaugural address. To do so, he 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 him to take multiple images and stitch them together, creating a massive image file.

The 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 a Macbook Pro and the completed TIF file is almost 2 gigabytes.

Use the controls to zoom and pan around the photo. You can also double click to zoom in and double click again to get even closer.