One of Ansel Adam’s seminal shots of Half Dome, “Monolith, The Face of Half Dome”, provided inspiration to re-photograph the landmark shot with gigapixel techniques. We ascended the class III and IV route in July 05 with the intention of shooting from the same station point. We found Ansel’s obvious shooting platform in a boulder situated immediately adjacent to a 3500’ drop once at the south shoulder of the great wall. This turned out to be a perfect, though unnerving location for spherical shooting, as the tremendous drop afforded a great down angle. We employed Peace River Studio’s PixOrb motion control head to automatically shoot over 300 shots w/ a Canon 1Ds Mk2 and 100mm lens. This resulted in a 3.8 gigapixel, 90,000 pixel-wide image, one of our largest to date. The 22 gig 16 bit file takes over an hour to load in Photoshop. Once open, scrolling the image provides a very immersive experience exploring the various areas and trails of the park. Shooting time-lapse cloudplay over the Dome from Glacier Point provided a base for a 3D integration study in Maya using w/ a DEM displacement of the terrain, resulting in a dimensional flight into the valley. A narrow-field mosaic was also shot of the Dome and our shooting location on the Diving Board. A later trip in winter provided perfect conditions to shoot a narrow-field high-density mosaic of the face of El Capitan, shot from the open talus of Cathedral Peak. The swirling winter mist added perfect time-lapse opportunities. Using the DEM data and DOFpro, we can also simulate a miniature appearance.

Team Members: Eric Hanson, Greg Downing, Ron Shirley.