digitaldust

Last month some dutch guys at a university in Delft created a newsworthy 2.5 gigapixel composite photo using an off the shelf digital SLR and some of their own image stitching software. Nice work, great location to shoot from… boring image.

Now here is something I find much more exciting…The Gigapxl Project. They’re doing 4Gpxl images in a single shot, very cool.

Defining the upper limits of large-format photography, digital scanning and image processing, custom-built Gigapxl™ cameras capture images with unprecedented resolution.

It would take a video wall of 10,000 television screens or 600 prints from a professional digital SLR camera to capture as much information as that contained in a single Gigapxl™ exposure.

They’re using an old military spy plane camera and huge format film (9×18 inch), and then scanning it at ultra-high resolution (25,000 ppi), to give themselves an enormous image with shit hot resolution. In the close ups you can peer in windows from miles away or see the rigging on a ship in the SF bay from the headlands above.

10 Megapixel cameras are just around the corner and they WILL blow 35mm away as a film option. But to get appreacable large format results will require at least 10 times that again. Theoretically, as with most technology, this should only take the time it took to go from 1Mpxl to 10Mpxl. Maybe 10-15 years. However there wont be the market driving that necessity. There will be a gap in products between 10Mpxl and 1000. So maybe a slow down after the 35mm market is slaughtered. Who knows, but I’m off to get myself a pile of 10×8 slide which should see me through the next 10 years at least.

The other option is to get myself a second hand military spy satellite. They ought to do this all digitally.

My only question is why? So you can wave it around and zap anyone silly enough to steal it? Surely carrying a big fuck off stun gun would be a better deterent.

And the best bit…

“Does Not Work as a Cell Phone, only Stun Gun”

I subscribed to Mark Morford months ago on the recommendation of Alice. Mostly he rants about obscure west coast stuff that I dont understand cause I dont live in San Fran, drink vente vanilla half cafe soya lattes or get confused about my gender. But finally a piece close to my heart and closer to my body chemistry.

“Forty-four percent of all Americans. That’s the latest number. Almost half us are popping at least one prescription drug and fully one in six are popping three or more, and the numbers are only increasing and this of course doesn’t count alcohol or cigarettes or bad porn and it doesn’t count the mad megadoses of jingoistic flag-waving God-slappin’ fear — which is, as evidenced by the last election, a stupendously popular FDA-approved drug in its own right. But that’s another column. “

More from the “Truth is stranger than science fiction” department. Wired News reports on cute looking death dealing robots. (also on defensetech) These little guys remind me of the scutters from red dwarf. I wonder what sort of noise they make as they scuttle around the desert. I like to imagine they beep to each other like little robots are meant to, just like R2D2 or maybe the little guys from Silent Running.

Japanese “love making” manual. Not all of the book is here, but enough to let one’s imagination run wild with the rest. Good bits are the masturbation technique and the body stockinged girl getting not too jiggy with a life size drawing dummy.

http://www.vintagepbks.com/images/satyr/greenleaf/gc220.jpg

Sleaze Science Fiction Covers, some of them by the greats. While I could expect… in fact would demand… these sorts of covers on an A E Van Voght book, you wouldnt expect them from dry Stapledon material. As expected there are a couple from Phillip Jose “I write for playboy” Farmer, and interestingly “Virgin Planet” from kidult scifi guy Poul Anderson. Guess everyone’s got to eat.