Imagine the biggest photo you have ever taken. Now multiply that size by 1000. Now square that. You still won’t come close to the the world’s largest photograph, clocking in at 70 gigapixels (70 billion pixels).  That is more zeros than on the scoreboard of a Pirates game (sorry Pittsburgh fans, I’ll stop now).  This photo is truly a masterful work of art, ingenuity, and savvy engineering.

The record breaking panorama was taken by 360world, a group of brilliant designers, engineers, photographers, film editors, and camera men located in Hungary. These guys specialize in various photographic efforts and put forth some very progressive work. In order to take their 70 gigapixel shot, the team set up shop on an observation tower named Janos-hegyi, the tallest point in Budapest. Two Sony A900 cameras with 400mm lenses were mounted on robotic arms stationed on the top of the tower. These arms rotated for days while simultaneously hitting the shutter buttons. The Budapest panorama nearly doubles the size of the previous world record picture which was taken in Dubai and contained 45 gigapixels.

The exquisite detail of the photograph is incredible. At certain angles you can actually zoom far enough in to see people inside the windows of buildings. You can view the photo on the 70 gigapixel website. I would load it on here, but with a whopping 200 GB file made up of 20,000 compressed pics, I would probably then get fired after crashing the entire office server (it wasn’t me BFG, I swear). On the site you can also view a video of the making of the photograph, as well as learn about the post-processing operation. I wouldn’t recommend printing the shot though. Stretching 45 feet in length, it could take a good while to print and consume a barrel full of toner.

360world takes gigapixel photography to another level and continues to cross over the lines of what is possible within photography. Follow the group as I am sure they will have more works of art to share with the world soon.

Ah oui, Paris! Check out this incredible view of the City of Light.

If you can’t be in Paris chilling by the Seine then this is almost the next best thing.

The technology behind all this “gigapixel” stuff escapes me, but all I know is that it looks incredible. I’ve seen a few of these super-pixel photos but they are usually of an event of some kind, such as the inauguration or a football game.

With a few clicks you can literally dive right down to where you can see the cracks on the buildings and you can practically look through the windows. Pretty awesome.

Try the HD version to really spice up the visual dose.

The whole thing is a stitching together 2346 photos to make up a super hi-resolution panoramic of one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

As a longtime Flickr fan and photographer of odd things, I’m excited about a new location-based game that integrates my kind of photography. It’s called Noticings and it’s all about sharing images of the things around you. Read Write Web calls it a Foursquare for photographers.

Players get points for things like being the first to notice something in a neighborhood or for noticing typos like this one:

It’s easy to play along. Sign in with your Flickr account and make sure you’re geo-tagging your photos and tagging them with “noticings.” There’s also a handy iPhone app that uploads your photos for you.

Once you start playing, check out the dashboard for recent activity. Points are calculated once a day at 15:00 GMT.

I love seeing new uses of social media tools out there and all in all, this appears to be a very cool use of Flickr’s location API.

If you’re a music fan and should find yourself in Budapest between now and July 5, a stop at the Ludwig Museum for their Anton Corbijn exhibit should be at the top of your list of things to do (after sampling goulash and checking out the castle of course).

I was pleasantly surprised to find the Dutch photographer and videographer the focus of an exhibit in Hungary but then again his work over the past 30 years has gone beyond borders. And in this case, it’s even gone beyond the walls of communism, with the exhibit featuring some of Corbijn’s older (and powerful) work, such as the Joy Division photograph shown here. This was shot many years before the fall of communism in Hungary.

His use of black of white in this shot is typical of Corbijn’s work at the time and it’s also what separated him from the glitzy photography that was customary in the ’70s and ’80s. Other works in the exhibit show off Corbijn’s grainy development, use of shadows, and his subjects hiding their eyes. It all adds up to a unique body of work, one that brings our idolized musicians and celebrities into the shadows, making us question who they are and the way we’re used to seeing them portrayed.

If you make the exhibit, also be sure to spend time checking out shots from his 23-year relationship with Depeche Mode. And whether you make it there or not, Corbijn’s film Control about Ian Curtis of Joy Division isn’t to be missed.

Cold weather and icy conditions are rough on all, but ice, in its many forms, is also quite beautiful and makes for a great photographic subject. Here are some shots taken while strolling through Boston.

Almost a week after the Obama inauguration and you may be feeling like you’ve hit media coverage overload. But if you haven’t checked out David Bergman’s massive photo from Inauguration Day, then you’re missing out.

He paired a Canon G10 with a Gigapan robotic mount—a device that makes a hi-res, widescreen photo possible without the potential for human error—to capture 220 images, which were then stitched together to create the 1,474 megapixel image.

The coolest thing about the giant photo is that you can use the online viewer to zoom in pretty much anywhere in the shot, offering close ups of both the enthusiastic and the bored. It’s voyeurism at its finest and certainly a good reference image for historians down the line.

There is a new optimism in the air as we step into a new year. For example, these two brands, Pepsi and Dunkin Donuts, are hoping you are feeling as optimistic and upbeat as they are. Are you?

I recently snapped this photo while visiting NYC that shows off the American flag and skyline. Optimistic? Yes.

A story on NPR this morning kindly reminded me that a photo project I’ve been following online this year is coming to an end today. For the past year, six photographers have been taking a photo at the same time every day (7:15 PM) and posting them online at sametime715.com.

Early on, the site looked more like an online photo gallery, but as the project progressed, it became something more. With captions attached to each photo, it’s diary-like but more importantly, when you take all of the individual posts collectively, it paints of picture of who each artist is.

With each artist documenting what they were doing each day at 7:15, there are often shots of dinner time or other seemingly mundane, everyday things we all do. But the photos are far from mundane. And because they’re taken on a daily basis, something about them becomes rather extraordinary and also different from sites like Facebook where people also post personal information, as co-founder Brad Walker points out.

Comparing SAMETIME 7:15 to social networking sites, “this feels a lot more risky because this is a chance to show your life being boring,” Walker says. “The whole point of those Web sites is to show your family, your dog — all your prizes. And this is kind of about the opposite of that actually, you know? Showing how day-to-day is not really full of that necessarily.”

When not working or designing video games for the iPhone, I like to take snaps of the world around me. Here’s a recent visitor to my yard here in Savannah.