If Your first thought is that this massive image was shot with a high end Hasselblad then you are wrong. It was shot with a Nikon D300 and Nikon 85mm f1.8 lens. Then how do we go from 12 Megapixels to 100+ megapixels? That’s easy! We shoot the same way we shoot a panoramic photo and then just stitch it later in Auto Pano Pro (Taking Panoramic Photos Part 1 Taking Panoramic Photos Part 2). The size isn’t what makes the image special. It is the effect a fast prime like the Nikon 85mm f1.8 offers us when working at such close distance. We used the Nikon 85mm f1.8 because it is fast and it has almost no distortion which makes stitching the final image a breeze.
The front image of the car consists of 32 photos taken at f1.8 with the focus locked on to the GTI badge. It is important to focus on the point you want and then set your focus to manual to make sure the focus doesn’t change. You also have to lock the exposure otherwise it will cause some very ugly blotches on the merged image. We start by taking a photo of the area we focused on and work our way outward. Remember that you need to leave alot of space around the car to allow for cropping after wards.
The back of the car consists of 50 images and that is because I actually got a bit closer to the car to lessen the depth of field and enhance the effect while also making it look like it was shot with a very wide angle lens. The back is unfortunately not as clean as the front and subtracts quite a bit from the image.
The front image was 130 Megapixels and the back image was a whopping 160 Megapixels after they were merged. I try to avoid photoshop whenever I can and prefer editing my images in Capture NX 2. This however caused some very interesting problems because Capture NX 2 isn’t know for being fast or stable but more on this in another post later this week.
Here are the final images in a very nice wallpaper size for everyone! click to download the full size image.
Happy Shooting!
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