At full size, you’d have trouble squeezing a print of this particular image into a photo album, but then this is no ordinary photograph. Captured by an international team led by photographer Filippo Blengini, this enormous panorama of France’s Mont Blanc recently landed in the record books as the world’s largest photograph.
Taking 70,000 shots to produce, the final image (shown below at full width but definitely not full size) comprises a whopping 365 gigapixels, smashing the previous record – a photo of London taken two years ago – by a decent 45 gigapixels. To gather the imagery, the five-person team used a Canon 70D DSLR, a Canon EF 400mm f/2.8 IS II lens, and a Canon Extender 2X III on a robotic mount.
The record-breaking photo, which shows one of the world’s highest mountains in glorious detail, took up 46 terabytes of space on countless memory cards and was captured during 35 hours of shooting across 15 days. Post-production, which mainly involved image processing and stitching to create the giant panorama, took a further two months.
The project took place at 3,500 meters (11,482 feet) above sea level, with temperatures dipping to as low as 14 Fahrenheit (minus 10 Celsius) during the shoot.
“We were brave, crazy and ambitious enough to think about a gigapanoramic picture, to seize every single detail of the mountain,” the team says on its website, adding it wanted to show off the “major beauty, astonishing magnitude, and pure elation” of “Her Majesty the Mont Blanc.”
Fancy exploring mountain via the 365-gigapixel panorama? The interactive viewer on the team’s website works superbly, with super-smooth zooming taking you up close to all parts of the rocky formation.
