About

Erik Bernhoft is an amateur photographer based in Bellingham, Wa.  He can be found in his element and at his best scrambling the mountains of the North Cascades, cruising the Olympic Peninsula of Washington, exploring remote corners of South-Central Alaska, or gallivanting around the deserts of Southern Utah.

How is this done? Well…Precariously

Spherical Panoramas:

Spherical Panoramas are a series of wide angle photos that are strategically shot with some specific hardware and then intricately stitched together to form one image. This image is processed by a number of different software programs, artificially distorted at the poles of the photo and then projected onto the inside of a sphere. Viewers of the panorama are positioned into the perspective of the center of this environment and thus enjoy an immersive, interactive environment.

Gigapixel Photography

Gigapixel photography is an advanced genera of photography that involves the stitching of MANY (sometimes hundreds) high zoom photos together to form a wide angle perspective of a scene. In this process, it makes it possible to see the big picture (a cityscape, mountain, distant landscape) but also the ability to closely interrogate small areas (someone reading the newspaper on a deck hardly visible from the original photo, distant mountain peak hardly noticeable from the landscape) of the palate with unrivaled clarity and detail. A typical camera takes between 15-30 megapixels, however, when you compound this with hundreds of photos the final product is often a photo that is in excess of 1000 megapixels. The polished photo could be enlarged and projected onto large areas (the size of the side of a barn, a wall in your house, etc)