Photographer upconverted this lightning photo to 5.45 gigapixels

Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/07/31/photographer-upconverted-this.html

Enhance…

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Gimme a hard copy right there.

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So if I understand the process correctly, the lightning itself still 50 megapixels…the lowest res part of the image?

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Maybe I’m a purest , but I’m expecting a photo, not a collage of heavy Photoshop trickery.

There’s too much flowery wording and texture to grasp everything.

Best I can tell is he took ONE picture a while ago with a lightning bolt in it, then he went back to the same spot and did some sort of stitched Giga-Pan thing … tweaked the hell out of everything THEN hand-traced a lightning bolt over final image.

Sill cool, but the best photographs happen in-camera at the moment. Seems like a lot of manipulation to do for a photo of a naturally occurring phenomenon, and even THAT part was faked.

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Yes, but if he blended it well you wouldn’t really notice as those are all over-exposed (white) anyway.

(If you RTFA he gives a really coherent explanation of the whole process.)

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I’m also curious if he would have had that gigapixel camera the first time around if it could’ve captured the lightning bolt as well as the first camera or if there’s some limitations from that hardware. It that camera can capture a lightning strike then it seems to me that trying to capture one natively on it would be ideal.

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In an age where the most popular films are 90% cgi, I don’t think what he’s done is trickery. It’s as tricky as a panorama. And it’s also a work of art, not photojournalism. I think you might be disappointed to realize that the majority of images you see these days are manipulated to a lesser or greater extent than you might expect.

Not really all that far from HDR or Zone System.
As it’s not meant to reproduce truthfully an actual event I think it’s a valid method to create a nice picture.

I agree with Alvin_Goodman. It’s not really a gigapixel photo of a lightning. It is at best a gigapixel panorama of a backdrop for a hand-drawn lightning. All trying to mimick the original photo he took.

And the fact you see so many 'shopped images everywhere would have really made this one stand out if it wasn’t.

Please allow for disappointment…

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Pretty sure that a gigapixel camera capable of taking a photo in a fraction of a second has yet to be invented. If you read the headline and thought it was now possible, then I understand and give you your disappointment.

I think that’s covered in the last line here.

Well I think the F was a bit uncalled for though but :slight_smile:

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