Dubbed "The Great Picture," this gigantic photograph was created with what Guinness World Records also recognizes as the world’s biggest (pinhole) camera. Since such news rarely make the front page, I thought of sharing this one with the readers.

Just how large is this picture? The finished size is 31 feet 7 inches by 111 feet or 3375 square feet printed on a special seamless muslin fabric.

The Great Picture

Previous to exposure, this fabric was coated with 80 liters of emulsion to make it light-sensitive. This "film" was then positioned inside an old airplane hangar (measured at 44 ft. 2 in. in height, 79 ft. 6 in. deep, and 161 ft. 6 in. wide) that acted as the camera obscura (lensless pinhole). After an exposure of 35 minutes with a 6mm pinhole at a height of 15 feet, the exposed fabric was treated with 600 gallons of black and white developer and 1200 gallons of photo fixer delivered by submersible pumps. Finally, high-pressure fire hoses were used for the final washing of the print.

The resulting photograph is an inverted black-and-white negative image of the landscape fronting the hangar.

Credit for The Great Picture belongs to photographers Jerry Burchfield, Mark Chamberlain, Jacques Garnier, Rob Johnson, Douglas McCulloh, and Clayton Spada. They shot the photo on July 8, 2006 after many months of preparations, including plugging all lightleaks in the building. To learn more about this project, the reader is invited to visit the website: www.legacyphotoproject.com. A very interesting 20-minute documentary movie titled "V.3 The Great Picture" can also be viewed at video.google.com.

After reading this story, I wondered if there had also been some progress in high resolution digital imaging since I wrote about gigapixel images more than a year ago. At that time, the largest digital image ever achieved was a 7.5 gigapixel image of Delft, Netherlands done in 2004. This was attained by stitching 600 pictures together.

Setting up the fabric

After a brief Internet search, I learned that this was surpassed last year when the HAL 9000 group of Mauro Gavinelli produced an 8.6 gigapixel photograph of the Parete Gaudenziana in the Santa Maria delle Grazie Church in Varallo, Italy. Then again last month, this group created a still bigger image - at 9.9 gigapixels – of the fresco painting by Andrea Pozzo at the Sant’Ignazio de Loyola Church in Rome. These fantastic images, stitched from more than a thousand frames, can be enjoyed with zoom features (if you have macromedia flash installed) at: http://haltadefinizione.deagostini.it.

However, the claim to the biggest gigapixel image still belongs to Gerard Maynard. Early this year, Maynard created a 13.1 gigapixel image titled "Harlem 13 Gigapixels" with 2,045 photographs of the city taken from atop a building. This is a very awesome image that is best enjoyed by using the zoom controls to see details of structures situated miles away from where the camera actually stood. See and appreciate the power of very high resolution graphics at www.harlem-13-gigapixels.com.