Distinguished Lecture

The Gigapxl™ Project

January 30, 2007

The Gigapxl™ Project combines cutting edge large-format photography with digital scanning to create ultra-high-resolution images that can be captured at rates on the order of 30,000,000,000,000 bits per second. Achieving such rates calls for the careful balancing of many factors; especially factors related to atmospheric blurring, lens aberrations, film granularity, and image pixelation. In addition to our pursuit of ever-increasing information content, a near-term goal of the Gigapxl™ Project is the production of an ultra-high-resolution Portrait of America; the scope of which already extends to about 800 sites in the U.S. and Canada. A longer-term goal is to document for future generations the endangered archaeological and cultural areas which appear on UNESCO's World Heritage Sites list (830 properties).

Presenter Bio

Graham Flint & Catherine Aves, Gigapxl™ Project

A physicist by profession, Graham Flint has sought to bring the perspective of a physicist to other fields; especially to architecture, astronomy, medicine, military science, photography, and, most recently, to information display. Early in his career, he was co-inventor of the world's first infrared laser rangefinder, after which he pioneered the application of lasers in areas as diverse as eye surgery and space-based weaponry. In the context of photography, he has designed cameras for applications which range from cold-war espionage to the Hubble Space Telescope. He has published more than a hundred technical papers and holds a dozen patents. Graham has held positions as Chief of Lockheed Martin's Laser Devices Laboratory, as Executive Vice President of International Laser Systems, and as Director of the Air Force's Developmental Optics Facility. Most recently, and until joining the ranks of the semi-retired, he served as President and CEO of Photera Technologies, a California-based corporation specializing in ultra-high-resolution imagery and laser digital cinema. Along the way, he has been Chairman of the Laser Division of the U.S. Electronic Industries Association and Co-chairman of the Channel Islands Alternate Energy Commission. As an avocational endeavor, he has pursued the Gigapxl™ Project, a project which brings together the cutting edges of photographic optics, film technology, and digital processing so as to create landscape photographs which contain unprecedented amounts of information. With a background in Fine Arts, Anthropology and Geology, Catherine Aves brings a multidisciplinary perspective to the Gigapxl™ Project. The founding of her desktop publishing business, TechEditions, in 1989 was prefaced by nearly 20 years experience in positions which included Technical Editor for the Air Force's Developmental Optics Facility, Office Manager and Editor for several environmental research organizations, and Document Specialist for the Albuquerque Cultural Resources Division of the Bureau of Land Management. During recent years, she has become intimately familiar with the sophisticated aspects both of Adobe Photoshop and of pigment ink printing; especially with those aspects which relate to ultra-high-resolution imagery. Working closely with engineers in the computer software and digital printing fields, she has used Gigapxl's multi-gigabyte native-resolution files to exercise their latest versions of software and hardware and to emphasize the need for digital processing tools which can handle ever-increasing file size.

Close