Landscape Gigapixels
Look at Angkor Wat, then push in, and the strangler-fig roots pouring over a carved doorway resolve down to individual fibres. Look at the whole bay at Railay, then push in, and there are people on towels. Ten places, four continents, one method, no client. This is the practice underneath every commissioned gigapixel job in the portfolio, and none of it has ever been on the site.
The ten are: Angkor Wat, Cape Lookout, Chiricahua National Monument, Crater Lake, the Kalepa Ridge Trail, Khao Sok National Park, Mount Erie, Oneonta Falls, the Painted Hills and Railay Beach. Cambodia and Thailand, Kauai, the Arizona hoodoos, the Washington coast range, and four Oregon subjects that read as a single home territory: a caldera, a waterfall in a slot canyon, a headland on the coast, and the striped ash of the John Day country.
That grouping is not curation. It is where a person went. Nobody commissioned any of these, and none of them was finished as a flat photograph. Each one was rendered as a zoom tour, which is the right form for the material: a gigapixel landscape only becomes what it is at the moment somebody travels into it.
Video of Railay Beach — the approach into the bay, the same view the gigapixel tour eventually zooms into — is on this page now. The other nine places are stills only.
And a gigapixel landscape is a different object from a wide shot of the same place. The camera sits on a robotic head and walks a long lens across the scene in a grid, hundreds of frames at a time, and what comes back is not a view but a surface you can search.
The dating is honest and thin. Every tour in the folder was exported on the same day, 16 April 2019, which tells you they were finished together and nothing else. No capture log exists and the original source frames are not on the drive, so the year each place was actually photographed is genuinely unknown. The single still is a year older.
That still is the most useful file in the folder. It shows a photographer standing in a high-desert field beside a camera raised on a tall mast pole, a ranch and its ponds below, snow along the whole horizon. It is the only image anywhere in the project of how one of these gets made.
There is one more thing this set raises that the commissioned work never has to answer out loud. At this resolution, individual sunbathers on a public beach become identifiable from a frame of the whole bay. That is a real property of the medium rather than a flaw in the file, and this is the fair page to name it on, rather than discovering it after a deep-zoom viewer has shipped.
What Gavin did
- Shot ten gigapixel landscapes on GigaPan robotic heads, working alone, on his own time
- Stitched and finished each one as a zoom tour rather than a flat image
- Exported the whole set together on 16 April 2019
No commission, no brief, no publication.
Self-initiated — no client, no brief, no publication