Loowit Imaging

Wednesday afternoon, while driving to work, I stopped at the high point of Mason Lake Road just north of home, to take in how wonderful the light was playing on the slopes of a glistening-white Tahoma. The shadows of advancing high clouds made for an especially pleasing visual treat. The view didn't last long, however. In a few minutes' time, the peak was under total cloud shadow, and by that time, my SD card had run out of space.

In the meantime, in the last couple days, I've spent some time restoring a vintage Nikon FE 35MM SLR. Hoping to go back to basics in film sometime very soon.

This image here, without a doubt, is a photograph of Tahoma I will forever be proud of.

The master resolution of this monster, a seventy-seven frame panorama, is ginormous. Its effective resolution surpasses 650 megapixels, and is over 55,000 pixels wide. If printed at its native resolution, it could wrap the side of a Walmart easily, with crystal-clear clarity and no pixellation.

To accomplish this massive image, I used a Nikon D5500 DSLR, set to 1/1000 second shutter exposures, at ISO 100. The lens? A beasty Meade Series 5000 480mm f/6 Apochromatic refractor telescope. Each of the 24 megapixel sub frames are coma and chromatic abberation- free from edge-to-edge, which allowed for seamless stitching of all seventy-seven frames. The stitching was completed in three separate batches to preserve processing power, because my computer could not handle stitching all seventy-seven frames at once.

Twenty-one hours of automated script-based image processing time was required to produce this monster, in addition to over twelve hours of manual editing and fine-tuning. My only complaint is that Facebook does not allow for the uploading of the original. Details as small as boulders three feet across and house-sized glacier seracs are easily discernable in the master file.

https://flic.kr/p/2ruRDZT