For our first blog post, I’m excited to share a years-long venture into having a setup to reliably perform aerial gigapixels with the DJI M600.
What is a gigapixel?
A gigapixel image is a large-resolution image typically achieved by high-megapixel cameras with medium to long lenses and overlap. You may have seem some online of cities or sports games. Gigapixels are most easily identified by the viewer’s ability to zoom far in while still maintaining sharp detail.
How is a gigapixel useful?
Aside from impressing your friends, gigapixels can be used in a number of applications. Imagine you are a construction company building a skyscraper. You can take gigapixels every so often during the process and be able to refer back to these images if you forget where you placed beams that are now covered by cement. A doctor could use a gigapixel taken during a surgery to zoom way in to make sure he didn’t leave the scalpel in your pancreas. They can also be used for VFX purposes in film and TV.
How do you take a gigapixel image?
Phase One camera mounted on the Black Forest Motion panoramic tripod head.
There are a number of ways to do this, but we chose to use an automated panoramic tripod head from our friends at Black Forest Motion. They are a German company that designs tripod heads and sliders, and also have an accompanying app that takes a lot of the guesswork out of the gigapixel.
You can use any camera and lens combination that you want, but there are a few factors that will determine how many photos you’ll need to take and how zoomable your image will be.
We prefer to use higher megapixel cameras such as the Sony A7R series or a Phase One. We’ve used from 50mm up to 100mm lenses with successful results. We use 40% overlap between images.
If you’re taking the images from the ground, you can preset a shooting pattern based on your lens length and overlap preferences using Black Forest Motion’s app, and their tripod head will do all the work for you.
How do you take a gigapixel with a drone?
The DJI M600 with a 100 megapixel Phase One camera.
Our DJI M600 is outfitted with a custom dampener. We bolted up a standard arca-swiss rail to the bottom, and slid in the plate with the Black Forest Motion automated tripod head attached. You’ll need an automated head with some way to control the system remotely so you can start the image taking process when the drone is up in position.
Processing the gigapixel
Matt checking the camera on a Sony A7R2 with a 50mm lens.
Since the camera is not perfectly steady hanging underneath the drone, we use a fast shutter speed to ensure that the images are not blurry. There are a few ways you can process the image depending on your available computing power, but Black Forest Motion chose to color the images in Lightroom, export to .jpeg and stitch in PTGui. With our setup, the automatic stitching in PTGui does a decent job without any adjusting.
The final product
The equirectangular image. Some Photoshop work has to be done to remove the drone arms and close up the sky.
Here is one finished 360 gigapixel shot with the Sony A7R2 at 50mm: 360 Gigapixel
Try it out and see how you can zoom in all the way to the Hollywood sign!