How do you take a photograph worthy of a luxury Bentley that starts at almost a quarter of a million dollars? With lots (and lots) of megapixels and camera tech inspired by NASA. Earlier this month, Bentley broke its own record with a 57.7 billion pixel photograph of Dubai and the new Flying Spur W12 S. The photograph encourages web browsers to explore Dubai and try to find the luxury car — like a high-tech version of Where’s Waldo for grownups.
Last year, the company ran a similar campaign when it shot a 53,000 megapixel image of the Golden Gate Bridge with enough detail to see the car’s iconic logo stitched into the headrest of a rose gold Mulsanne. The company’s latest image is based on similar technology, but ups those megapixels to 57,700, making it one of the most detailed landscape images yet.
Bentley says it put the same attention to detail that goes into the 130 man-hours required to craft the Flying Spur into creating the image of Dubai. The camera was suspended from the Cayan Tower, one of the city’s tallest buildings about 866 feet (264 meters) above street level. The camera took 1,825 images over the course of two days. Each image was then stitched together and corrected for the light levels — since the process took so long that the images were shot at different times of day. Fifteen-mile-per-hour wind also threatened the project.
With all those images stitched, the photo becomes one of the largest landscape shots yet — it took 18 hours to download the file.
Along with exploring the city and finding the car which is (spoiler alert!) in the marina toward the center of the image, the image is detailed enough to zoom all the way to the iconic winged logo on the car’s hood. Bentley also created a 360-degree video showing off the car’s interior, narrated by the company’s head of exterior design, John Paul Gregory.
Explore the full resolution image at Bentley’s website.
