Photographer’s Epic Gigapixel Photo of Huge Concert Hides 3 Waldos
A photographer has created a stunning four-gigapixel, super-high-resolution photo of a vibrant Rammstein concert featuring 55,000 revelers and three Where’s Waldos.
Roelof Bos spent 13 days shooting the gigapixel photo with the main day coming when the heavy metal rockers played. Viewers can get the full experience by heading to Bos’s website where you can zoom right in on any part of the 350-acre site and try to find the hidden Waldos.
Creating a Gigapixel Photo
Bos tells PetaPixel that he had the idea months before the heavy metal concert was due to take place in Groningen, Netherlands.
After setting up on a nearby building, he rigged a Canon R5 with an RF 135mm f/1.8 on a self-modified panoramic head that captured the 80 photos needed to stitch together the gigapixel image.
“The panoramic head enables both preset horizontal as well as vertical increments,” explains Bos. “Once stitched by panoramic software, it results in a four-gigapixel image.”
Bos also has a second R5 that he used to shoot close-ups and medium-range shots of moving objects emanating from the gig like fire and smoke which would otherwise be hard to stitch when shot on the panoramic head camera.
“A plume of smoke can easily cover four frames otherwise,” adds Bos.
For the Waldos, Bos tried to convince friends that were going to the gig to dress up as the cartoon character but instead settled on asking a friend to dress up a few days before the event and shot him from a similar angle of view.
Timelapse
Bos had a third camera running during his mammoth photo shoot, a wide-angle shot that was there as a backup and reference tool.
The backup camera shot 16,000 photos over a period of seven hours and so Bos thought it would be a good idea to make a timelapse from it.
“Turned out to be no easy job, both the amount of RAW images to process as well as adjusting the exposure of many images slightly to ease out pumps of changes in camera settings to adjust for the losing daylight.”
Last year, PetaPixel reported on photographer Jamen Percy who shot a mind-boggling gigapixel photo of last year’s Burning Man festival held in the Nevada desert.
More of Bos’s work can be seen on his website, Facebook, and Instagram.
Image credits: All photos by Roelof Bos.
