- Physicist Graham Flint is working on an ultra-high-resolution
portrait of America -- a series of gigantic, gigapixel images taken with
a custom camera made from bits and pieces of decommissioned Cold War hardware.
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- Armed with a self-designed camera he crafted from parts
of spy planes and nuclear reactors, Flint is crisscrossing America, taking
thousands of pictures of cities, monuments and national parks.
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- Weighing more than 100 pounds, Flint's camera captures
images at 4 gigapixels -- a resolution high enough to photograph four football
fields and capture every single blade of grass. When printed at maximum
resolution, the images are as big as billboards, but render the finest
detail.
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- A photograph of a San Diego beach shows a paraglider
swooping over bluffs. Zoom in on some tiny dots on the cliff, and a group
of people with binoculars and telephoto lenses can be seen. Follow their
gaze, and you'll see naked sunbathers on the beach.
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- "We might have to add fig leaves in Photoshop, it's
that good," said Flint.
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- Flint's Gigapxl Project is an attempt to capture America
in a series of very high-resolution portraits. Beginning in 2000, Flint
has made about 1,000 gigapixel photographs during long road trips covering
thousands of miles. His last trip lasted six weeks, stretched 9,000 miles
and resulted in 150 images.
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- "I photograph all the major cities and parks, all
the things people want to visit," Flint said, "all the things
that are quintessentially representative of the place I'm in." Flint
has photographed the Grand Canyon, ghost towns in California and Jefferson's
Monticello -- all in astonishing detail.
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- "Graham's unique background has made it possible
to create something that is truly impressive," said Adam Tow, a digital
media expert at Stanford University. "The prints are really quite
breathtaking. They make the highest-end digital cameras look like toys...
You could see the grooves in a golf ball in a landscape shot of Torrey
Pines Golf Course."
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- Now retired, Flint, a 67-year-old ex-pat Brit, had a
long career in weapons and space optics. Early on, he helped design the
first laser guidance systems for smart weapons. Later, among other things,
he worked on President Ronald Reagan's Star Wars program and built cameras
for the Hubble space telescope.
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- Ten years ago, Flint started on a project to photograph
the entire Milky Way in color and very high resolution -- a project never
before attempted, partly because it can't be done from one place on Earth.
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- Using his optics expertise, Flint designed and built
the camera, but before he could begin, his New Mexico observatory was shut
down by health inspectors who discovered rats carrying a lethal virus.
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- Flint turned his camera earthward.
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- The gigapixel camera is very large format, using 9-inch-by-18-inch
plates. It's the same format used in military spy planes like the U-2.
In fact, Flint uses old spy plane film magazines. "It was surplused
out, and I bought up most of them (about a dozen)," Flint said.
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- Large rolls of Kodak film, used mostly for aerial photography
and geological surveys, cost $1,200 each. The film is ultra-high-resolution
-- 4,000 pixels per inch -- but on a square-inch basis, it costs less than
35mm, Flint said. He cuts the film himself and loads it onto the magazines.
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- The gigapixel camera lenses were custom-designed and
cut by a specialist he knew from his defense contracting days, who is more
accustomed to making optics for military systems.
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- "They're essentially perfect," Flint said of
the lenses. "They're spectacular."
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- The lens is mounted with micrometer screws and dials
that can be adjusted to within one thousandth of an inch. To focus the
lens accurately, Flint measures the distance to every major object in the
field of view with a laser range finder. He then plugs the distances into
a set of algorithms that tell him how to adjust the screws.
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- Flint is very careful about choosing the right spot and
time of day for a shoot. He often follows storm fronts, shooting right
after a downpour when particulates have been washed out of the air. He
tries to get off the ground as much as he can, to minimize heat distortion.
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- Flint developed his own wheel-mounted tripod to lug the
camera around, and fitted his van with a shooting platform made from sliding
safety doors used in nuclear reactors.
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- He shoots three or four pictures in as many seconds,
and often uses more than one exposure to make the final image. His wife,
Catherine Aves, handles the post-production and often overlays the images
using photo-editing software to blend shadows and highlights, producing
the clearest possible image.
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- The images are scanned with a Leica Geosystems scanner,
a special scanner used in geoscience surveys and by NASA for space imaging.
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- Flint said the scanners capture about 4 gigapixels of
data, which corresponds perfectly to the resolution of the film. It is
neither over-sampling nor under-sampling the film: There is a one-to-one
correspondence. Each image fills an entire DVD with data.
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- The images are printed in strips on a large-format Epson
9600 printer and mounted on panels like wallpaper. They are printed on
standard matte paper with Ultrachrome inks.
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- "We get spectacular results," Flint said.
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- The biggest prints could theoretically measure up to
48 feet long and 24 feet high -- all from a single shot. But for practical
reasons, Flint's biggest print to date was 21 feet long. "Most places
don't have enough wall space to hang them," Flint said. "It's
as high as you can get. The only way to get higher is to stitch multiple
images together."
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- Flint's giant photographs have been exhibited at San
Francisco's Exploratorium, and several are in private collections, he said.
Next month, the first major exhibition of his work will be shown at the
TED conference in Monterey, California. This summer, San Diego's Museum
of Photographic Arts will display eight or nine of Flint's giant prints.
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- When he completes his photographic tour of America later
this year, Flint would love to take high-resolution images of hundreds
of endangered archaeological sites. He said he is in preliminary talks
with organizations like Unesco, which wants a detailed record of threatened
archaeological sites like Rome or Angkor Watt, which are steadily disappearing.
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- Flint said he's unlikely to undertake the project himself,
but will probably help design cameras and train crews.
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- "I'd love to do that," he said. "That
would be a worthwhile project for the conclusion of my career."
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