Article
As part of its latest marketing campaign, car manufacturer Bentley has created a fifty three billion pixel photo, made up of more than seven hundred individual photographs. The extreme resolution permits viewers to zoom so far into the picture (above) that the needlework of Bentley’s logo on the seat cover of a car passing over the bridge can be seen – from seven hundred meters / two thousand two hundred ninety seven feet away.
When the entire pic is viewed it isn’t visible there’s a car in the framework at all, as the panorama shows the entire 1.Two mile span of the bridge and a good length of coastline as well, but as the zoom function is activated the pic magnifies dramatically.
The picture, which Bentley is calling the world’s most extreme car photograph, was shot by British photographer Simon Stock, using several Nikon D810 cameras fitted with lenses of inbetween 300mm and 1500mm. The cameras were mounted on robotic goes that scanned the area in steps shooting a series of high-resolution long-lens pictures that were stitched together in post-production to create the final pic.
Simon explained some of the process to DPR:
‘The challenge was to create an photo in which the viewer could practice the journey from an epic broad panorama of the Golden Gate Bridge and zoom through the pic to the intricate stitching on the car’s seat in order to highlight the craftsmanship and obsessive attention to detail that makes Bentley cars so unique.
‘I spent fairly a bit of time testing all the various systems, cameras and lens combinations to get to the final result as no one had attempted this level of zoom before. One of the main issues working this way is that you can’t see the final result until you’re back in the studio and have stitched all the pictures together. This makes the testing fairly a lengthy process.
‘The time it took to capture the entire picture varied inbetween two and four hours depending on the focal length of the lens being used – the longer the focal length the more captures were required to make up the final broad view.
Comments
Comments
you can zoom only on the car and cannot elsewhere. very likely only the center part is high res
looks the same on facebook as any regular sized pictures
Man that’s an ugly car -even the paintjob.
Agree. In the late 70’s and early 80’s appalling two-tone paint jobs like that were the height of style, on cheap family Ford models especially. I guess the decrepid old guys who actually own Bentleys will still think it’s fashionable.
“Sour grapes” Yes -that’s very close to the side-color.
Newsflash: Vapid Brown, Plane Baby Blue and other ’70s car colors are back in style and have been so for a duo years now. You too can drive a Hyundai, (or a Bentley), the same color as a ’74 Ford Pinto.
Reactive> Oh, I know. Back in like ’82 or ’83 my parents possessed a two-tone Brown/beige Ford Escort. Wow.
I witnessed this pic and movie before elsewhere and thought it was a Rolls Royce. Guess the paint job clone did it’s purpose of tricking people into thinking it’s a more expensive car.
So, the best the Germans could come up with was:
“Bentley: Vorsprang durch FOTO-Teknikk”
The holder of Bentley motors a.k.a. BMW
He’s most likely alluding to the fact that Bentley has been aquired by VW in 1998.
VW, not BMW. BMW possesses Rolls Royce.
Yep that’s right. got it wrong.
but its still German 🙂
HQ is in England however, so wouldn’t that still make it a British car company?
A few seem to keep up with the light hearted references to car marketing and brand authenticity. Others, perhaps not. 😄
Legit question tho’..
There are car people who don’t know that Bentley and Rolls have been German brands for years now?
Yes Bentley is part of VW, but that doesn’t inherently make it German does it?
May I suggest you comeback here, to exit loop:
I take it you must not be much of a car enthusiast yourself?
A £275,000/$400,900 car, the definition of lame conspicuous consumption.
Not as awesome compared to the grand photograph of Climb on Everest where you can zoom anywhere, from glaciers to Base Camp.
Clearly a Photoshop fail. One hi-res picture of the bridge, with a Bentley inserted in the only zoomable area. Spare us this garbage.
If this photo were real (it’s not) the car would be 450m from the view point (not 700m). To resolve the stitching on the Bentley logo the photographer would have needed a 11,000mm lens with an aperture of more than a meter. Not to mention supernaturally clear and still air.
In fact the picture is most likely made up of just three shots: one of the bridge, one of the car, and one of the logo. Notice how you can’t zoom in on any other area of the view.
Another fantastic example of the nauseating level of luxury and wastefulness of today’s society. And they didn’t even hire a local photographer.
I’ve heard people can die from jealousy.
Don’t worry, that won’t be what kills me. I’ll most certainly die from hantavirus while urbexing, or falling off a cliff. With a close third being a car accident, of course.
Albeit, for the record, I feel no jealousy whatsoever about wielding a Bentley. If you gave me one for free, I’d sell it, pay off my Subaru, and live off the rest of the money in the mountains for a decade. Mmm, now there’s a life I can be jealous of.
Traffic on the Golden Gate bridge is always very strenuous.
How did the bridge authority agree to close it to traffic for this commercial, and what was the cost (which is a pocket switch, and not an issue to Bentley customers when it is added onto the price of the car)?
They stitched all the “empty” spaces of the road from many photos from the same viewpoint.
Perhaps what is meant here is not that the pixel x pixel count = fifty three gigapixels, like the rest of us usually assume when talking about stitched pictures. Perhaps the total amount of pixel information amounts to the claimed picture size.
Some have suggested that a similar concept to the infinite zoom was used. If this is the case then it is a multilayered stacking of stitched picture. So the resolution on the car is greater than the rest of the photo. so denser pixel count on the car. So in the end they might be correct regarding the pixel information in the “file”, but it does not fall in line with how we usually think of it.
Perhaps someone should do a elementary test. Take a landcape pic at 50mm, then an photo of a subject at 200mm for example, then resize and layer it onto the landscape photo. When you zoom in to the subject it should be acute while the transition inbetween the two pics would be evident. But if you multi layer it.
53 billion pixels in all Photoshop layers is believable.
Or maybe they calculated: the file has one hundred ninety seven GB (believable), which is fifty three Gpix (each pixel made of thirty two bits). Again all layers combined plus Photoshop metadata.
Anyway, from photographer’s point of view it’s an article of little value. It’s a smartly thought out and executed advertisement which I like. But it’s absolute fail of DPReview to share it as a breakthrough photographic milestone. Or it’s a unspoiled PR which should be published as such.
Any publicity is good publicity.
The car is acute. The instant background isn’t. So the photographer must have panned the camera – at least for that bit. Very confusing.
Would it be a photo’s or video’s beauty that should impress artistic eyes or details like many cameras were used, clicked by a popular photographer, clicked in billion pixels, etc.?
They could have just hired me and saved all that money on airplane fare and stuff. I already own the equipment he used, like the Gigapan Pro (and a Gigapan Epic 100). Oh well.
Commercial success is just as much about how you market your abilities and your brand. Only the best rise to the top – certainly not me, not for lack of photography abilities. Some of the most successful pro photographers I met were former marketing execs.
I know, you’re right. I’m lousy at marking myself and my abilities.
@nathantw – you work the camera and I’ll drive the car.
. I could just sit in the back and smoke a big ceegar, and drop ash all over the carpet.
B letters on wheels are photoshopped 🙂 – ridiculous! Ahahahaha!
no – not photoshopped – the hubs do not rotate with the wheel.
I noticed this when I went to the British Grand Prix several years ago and shot some photos of F1 cars – the wheels in all the photos appeared static compared to the tyres; I’ve since noticed it a lot in prestige cars.
Actually – newsflash! – the entire picture is photoshopped.
yes, except that the “correctly” oriented wheels – that’s legit!
@BadScience Some F1 teams had that stationary hub cap for a while, but not anymore.
okay – that F1 photo was taken several years ago.
If only Nokia didn’t sell out and continued producing phones after the eight hundred eight and 1020! This could have been shot on the gagapixel Nokia Pureview and saved the photographer some time. If you look at this advertisement as a consumer and not a photographer I think it is good.
CG rendered car, with demonstrable CG rendered “human” sitting in the car.
“Simon explained some of the process”
Yeah, I’m sure he did.
C’mon, only fifty three billion? Lol.
I like the boat that isn’t in the publicity shot at all (linked at the top of this article) but is incuded in the actual zooming shot on Bentley’s site. Eyeing that boat as a 1:1 crop from the utter 53,000 megapixel photo would be indeed erect, too.
If I were Simon Stock, and eyed basically 99,9% of this board trashing an enormously high end assignment shot for Bentley, I’d sign in and ask everyone here to do any better. Would even give a deadline: one month, and sit back waiting for what you guys would actually produce.
But since I’m not Simon, I can’t speak on his behalf.
All I can say is that it’s super, super effortless to criticize other’s work sitting behind a keyboard.
Sorry for the harsh words, but what I’m telling is that if one doesn’t know any better and stops by this comments page, one would believe this is the most talented photography board on the planet.
99% of the commenters here act like they could actually supply a better picture to Bentley!
You’re missing the point. If I were Simon Stock and received an enormously high end assignment shot for Bentley, I would tell the truth if the shot turned out to be too difficult to produce via the planned methods. This isn’t about people acting like they could produce a better pic (gravely, it isn’t), this is about people pointing out that the entire official description of what the photo IS – and how it has been produced – is a lie.
It’s not necessarily the lie of Mr. Stock himself, but someone along the way has turned a PR shot into a hoax.
“An incredible Four,425 times larger than a typical smartphone picture, this extreme photograph is made up of approximately fifty three billion pixels (or 53,000 megapixels). It was created by taking seven hundred individual shots from the same location and ‘stitching’ them together digitally.” Ok, that’s the official word, so let’s see some other 1:1 detail in the picture. I’d like to look at some clouds, buildings and bridge structures, for example, thank you.