For the
official Diamond Jubilee Portrait of the Queen, the British based Australian
artist Ralph Heimans created a large scale and life-sized painting. MAX was
commissioned to create a Gigapixel image of the painting at a resolution that
would reveal every intricate brushstroke.
Images above used by Kind Permission of Ralph Heimans
To create a digital copy of the
painting we used a Hasselblad camera fitted with a Phase One camera back.
However, even the most sophisticated medium format digital cameras are not
capable of revealing all of the detail of such a large-scale work. We therefore
shot twenty-eight individual pictures of sections of the painting, which we
merged into one seamless image of over 1.5 GB in file size using the latest
imaging technologies. To generate a prefect image we had to ensure that the
lighting was consistent and that there was no glare from the highly glossy
surface of the delicate oil painting.
