40 Gigapixel: World’s Largest Indoor Picture Ever Taken

The cameras of today are getting better and better, and the quality is so good that reality sometimes can’t match the image. What I mean by that is that an image taken by one of the most sophisticated cameras that exists has more details in it than you would ever be able to see with your own eyes in reality. As a result of that, camera developers have entered into a race to see who can put together the highest resolution picture ever taken. It’s a close race, and the methods used vary as they try to come up with new approaches to beat their competition. Some focus on several cameras taking a collaborative image, while others take pictures with one camera and then stitch them together like a quilt to make up an ultra detailed image.

Photographer Jeffery Martin set out on a mission to take the highest resolution picture ever taken indoors, and by the looks of it, he succeeded. The result is a 40 Gigapixel (an amazing 280,000 x 140,000 pixels) photo taken over at the 868-year-old Strahov Monastery Library in Prague, Czech Republic. You are able to pan 360 degrees to make out every single detail.

The photo is so detailed that you can actually see the titles of each book on their spines. The full quilted image is made up of 2,947 images and was taken using a Canon 550D and 200mm lens. If you were to print the image, it would end up being 23m x 11m. The stitched file of the photo is 280GB that are cut into 85,000 tiles for faster web delivery. This is a huge achievement, and if you want to experience this image yourself, you can just head over to 360Cities.