Say Freeze: Photogs do 365-gigapixel sweep of Mont Blanc

Mont Blanc is the highest mountain in the Alps and has taken on an added distinction as the subject of the world's largest photograph. The Telegraph reported Monday that a photography team accomplished a world record-setting panoramic photograph of this majestic mountain—no small feat, born out of a desire among the photography specialists who did it to pay tribute to Mont Blanc.

They said, "We just wished to represent it as it shows to our eyes: major beauty, astonishing magnitude, pure elation."

Cameron Macphail, digital sports producer and writer for Telegraph Sport, said the panorama weighed in at 365 gigapixels. To capture the concept of the panorama's size, Macphail said "the resulting image would be as large as a football pitch if printed out at 300dpi."

"There's megapixels and then there's gigapixels," wrote Jackie Dove in The Next Web. "Yes, the latter is actually a thing and it's the hallmark of what's being called 'the world's largest photo.'" How does a photo get that huge? "It takes a lot of photos," she said.

They sought, yes, to capture the entire mountain. They did capture 70,000 photographs in every direction over 35 hours of shooting, which went into the finished portrait. The group "spent two weeks late last year at an altitude of 3500 meters," said Macphail, putting up with -10°C temperatures.

"It took two months of post production to stitch the 14 Photoshop files together, resulting in a total file size of 46 terabytes," reported Joel Burgess in TechRadar.

This was an international team working with photographer Filippo Blengini. "The astonishing majesty of this impressive white giant is too wide to be represented either in words or images," said the team. "You have to be there to feel it. But now, you can grab that rarefied atmosphere through the highest-resolution panorama ever made."

They added, "We were brave, crazy and ambitious enough to think about a gigapanoramic picture, to seize every single detail of the mountain."

Their tools, said The Telegraph, included a Canon EF 400mm f/2.8 II IS. a Canon 70D DSLR and a Canon Extender 2X III on a special robotic mount.

Writing in TechRadar, Burgess said In2White, the photographic project headed by Blengini, went beyond the 320-gigapixel panorama of London taken in 2013, which previously held the title. The Mont Blanc team's photo is larger.

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