chase the light

This is why I love photography. It’s art, science, math, and travel all rolled up into one. So my buddy Eric has been holed up in his top secret lair for awhile building some sort of technological monster. XREZ. That’s all I knew for the longest time. I got a glimpse of this gigapixel concept last spring when they unveiled a print of this monster photograph of the Owens Valley in California. They had it printed out for group show at a gallery and the resolution was insane. It was pretty spectacular. But, they had more things up their sleeve and last week they hooked up the jumper cables to the monster and hoped the lightning would strike and awaken it. Well it did, for a reeeeeeeally short time. Their servers couldn’t handle the amount of data and throughput of the people hitting the site.

Anyway, a week later they’re back on their feet and their photo monster is awake and alive and kicking. You should go have a look. There are all sorts of cameras, motion control heads, software, and scripts involved and it makes me happy just thinking about it all. They’ve taken the Google Maps API thingy-ma-bob and mapped their own images with it to create massive photographs that you can zoom into to minute detail. You can reload the front page to get new images. Also on the site are some timelapses with a twist. They’ve mapped those timelapses onto 3D geometry and put in camera moves to get an cool sense of movement. This is an incredible timelapse of Mt. Whitney here in California [LINK]. The tallest mountain in the lower 48.

So go check out my friends work and have fun looking around XREZ. [LINK]

I love when my friends are being cool. The magnificent bastard, I’m jealous.