One of the most fascinating, enjoyable and useful benefits of digital photography is the ability to easily make photo mosaics. Mosaics are multiple images stitched together to make a single, larger image.
The most common photo mosaics are simple panoramic images, where a wide subject is photographed at different points across its width and the resulting row of images are stitched together to make a single, full-length image. Simple panoramics work great for wide landscape vistas that are too wide for a single lens to capture.
Photo mosaics can also be made from multiple rows of photographs. For example, if you photograph the upper right and left and lower right and left of a subject with four separate images, you can stitch the images together to make a photo mosaic made from 2 rows of two photos each. If each individual image was 3000 x 3000 pixels in size, the resulting mosaic could be as much as 6000 x 6000 pixels in size.
One of the big pluses of photo mosaics is that the resulting image is of higher resolution than a single image of the same subject, especially if many images are used. The example below of the Diamond face of Longs Peak, Colorado, was stitched together from 168 individual images, resulting in a final image with a resolution of 16,000 x 16,000 pixels! To get that large of an image from a single photograph you would need a 400 megapixel digital camera! Each image was shot with a 6 megapixel Nikon D70 camera and an AF-S VR-Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8G lens, at 200mm and 1/125 f/11 . The camera was mounted on a tripod and 168 images were taken in 12 rows of 14 photos each, with approximately 30% overlap between images. The images were stitched together using PTGui software.
