A Durban tagged image from Flickr – click on the name of the photographer below the image to see more Durban goodness.
Durban by Night 1024×768 Crop
Image by Andrew Roos
What I love about panoramas is their resolution and the detail that they hold. I find viewing a panorama an immersive experience, since I can zoom in to diferent areas of the image and get more and more detail. Since this is not easily visible on flickr (you would have to download the full size image), I thought I would post this 1024×768 pixel crop from "Durban by Night" showing the uShaka pier. I hope it conveys some idea of just how much detail there is in the panorama.
In fact, there may even be a bit more than this image shows since the original 3:1 crop of the panorama is a 53.6 MP image. However in order to post-process it in Bibble, I only rendered it as a 13.4 MP image, and I took the crop from this quarter size image. So each pixel in the crop is actually made up of four pixels from the full-size panorama.
Note for engineers: of course due to demosaicing and the anti-aliasing filter, these four pixels would not be independent. So I went to the original 53.6 MP image and rendered a 1024 x 768 crop which I post-processed in exactly the same way as the other images. Although the pixels are smaller, I can’t honestly say that I see any more resolvable detail in the 1:1 crop – anything I can see in that image, I can also see in the image posted here. So I conclude that the resolution I actually achieved due to a combination of the technical aspects (lens MTF, demosaicing, anti-aliasing filter and sensor noise), and my technique on the day, is not more than 1/4 the number of (monochromatic) pixels in the sensor.
