Incredible Hi Res of Half Dome

Hi Gang, I just stumbled upon this amazing website featuring zoomable hi-res images, including Half Dome. Take a look, it's pretty incredible. http://www.xrez.com/index.html

A rather large leap in digital imaging capabilities. The key ingredient they seem to have brought to a mature level is how to stitch together all the overlapping composite images without the usual tell tail variations in color shades and tones. A lot of the stiched images one usually sees can't really work well as a large image because the image boundaries tend to have artifacts where color and shades don't quite match smoothly along the whole edge. In other words one may be able to match a given location where two images meet when stiched together but above or below that area along the image edges may vary enough to be noticeable. And not easily fixed as one will have to deal with non-linear gradients at different points on the boundaries. Taking more overlapping images then being able to stitch them together automatically with advanced software I'm guessing is key to what they have done. Like large digital backs these tools may be limited to more stationary and still conditions depending on the time required to capture the full set of images. ...David

If you had read my "cool links" post, you'd have stumbled on it a week ago

They do mention the stitching software used. They also have time lapse photos.