Since I do so many of my own, you won't find me blogging about other people's panoramas very much but this gigapixel shot of the crowd as Obama gives his inaugural speech is well worth exploring full screen. David Bergman's story of the photo is available.

It was taken with the gigapan imager that I gave a negative review to last month. You can see why I want a better version of this imager. The shot is a great recording of history, as you can see the faces of almost all the dignitaries and high rollers who were there. It has a few stitch errors which would be a lot of work to remove by hand, so I don't blame the creator for doing just one 5 hour automated pass. When such an imager becomes available for quality DSLRs, the image will be even better -- this one faces the limitations of the G10. And due to the long time required to shoot any panorama of this scope, it looks like only some of the crowd are applauding, while others are bored.

I would love to see a shot of the ordinary folks in the far-away crowd too, but he wasn't in range to get that, and it would have needed a longer lens. A computer might be able to count the faces then, or even tell you their racial mix. The made-the-list area probably has more black faces than ever before, but still a small minority.

A few years in the future, every event will be captured at this resolution, until we start having privacy worries about it.