Professional photographer David Bergman made this giant panoramic image showing the nearly two million people who watched President Obama’s inaugural address at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC on January 20, 2009. Taken from the north press platform, it’s made up of 220 Canon G10 images. The original image size is 59,783 X 24,658 pixels or 1,474 megapixels. This new version is 56,646 X 27,788 or 1.57 gigapixels.

To make the image, David clamped a Gigapan Epic Imager to the railing on the north media platform about six feet from his photo position. The Gigapan Epic is a robotic camera mount that allows him to take multiple images and stitch them together, creating a massive image file. It took more than six and a half hours for the Gigapan software to stitch together all of the images on David’s Macbook Pro, and the completed TIF file is almost 2 gigabytes.

Click on the image above, then use the controls to zoom and pan around the photo. You can also double click to zoom in and double click again to get even closer. If you zoom way in, you’ll note that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is not sleeping, President Bush is not sending a text message, and Oprah Winfrey is blocked by a camera tower. Look more closely and you’ll see Yo-Yo Ma taking a picture with his iPhone. David says he’s still looking for Waldo.

iPhone and iPod Touch users looking for something extra in the way of wallpapers to suit their style, personality and profession should find this useful. Smashing Magazine has compiled 100 beautiful iPhone wallpapers designed by some of the finest and most creative artists around.

The wallpapers are 320×480 pixels in resolution and cover typography, nature, retro and vintage, illustrations and artwork, Apple wallpapers, abstract and space. All are clickable and linked to their source.

I ran across this captioned photo the other day of what may have been a briefing of Santas (and one leggy helper) and thought it worthy of sharing…

Sit on Father or Mother Christmas’s knee and tell them that you’ve been good all year. Photograph: Toby Melville/Reuters

Patty sent four images she and Steve took while visiting Oahu over the summer. Click on the thumbnails to display the full size versions…

    

From the top and left to right: Waikiki Beach, Waimea Falls Arboretum, surfboards racked on the beach and Bishop Museum.

A picture really is worth a thousand words!

This table was purportedly listed for sale on eBay. Can you tell whether the seller was a man or a woman?

Think you know the answer?

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Michael provided these stunning HDR (high dynamic range) images. The first is of a people-mover system in Hong Kong, an example of HDR done right. The second HDR image was taken in Kuala Lampur and, although striking, I think it’s been over processed. Your thoughts?

This photo from friends John & Deb Phair of their dog “Sophie” made me chuckle. Sophie is a beautiful Coton de Tuléar, usually meticulously groomed. I fell in love with her the moment I first saw her. Well, who knew? She’s not only a little princess; she can rough it in the wild with the big dogs, too!

“You sorta get dirty fishing but it gives me some quiet time.”

Many of you enjoyed the last collection of animal images (Animal Kingdom 1), so here’s another, this one including African and marine wildlife. Enjoy!

It’s been a while since I posted a gallery of critter images. Barbara sent this collection, some cute, some artistic and some downright funny. Enjoy!

Literally.

“Sometimes they catch me, sometimes they don’t,” says the 28-year old performance artist who approaches strangers on the spot — usually a bar — and literally hurls her body at them. Hilarious and poignant, the resulting photographs make you wish you had been there to see what happened after the shutter release.

A tour of her web site includes several such “moments” along with video montages of her hugging strangers or protecting a chalk drawn box on a busy city sidewalk from passersby who might otherwise step inside. It’s an unusual art form in which McElroy is expressing herself… and making people laugh.

One of the great things about Americans is the way we all get cranked up for Independence Day. It’s a big event for most, with parades, BBQs and spectacular fireworks shows!

Californians for the most part stayed away from “real” fireworks this year because of the extreme fire danger — we’ve already had more than 1700 wildfires throughout the state precipitated by dry lightening and high winds, so our Governator asked that we not buy fireworks in order to help prevent even more. But many of the usual controlled exhibitions went off as scheduled including northern California’s largest at Cal Expo in Sacramento. Here are a few more images (click to enlarge):

We were blessed this year with cooler temperatures — we call anything less than 106° “cooler” — so Dawn and I took in the annual East Sacramento “Fab 40s” parade followed by lunch on the patio at Rio City Cafe in Old Sacramento. There was a nice breeze and we relaxed watching the boats cruising the Sacramento River. What began as a lousy day for me turned out to be a pretty darn good Independence Day!

This is my final “official” Patriot’s Journey post for 2008 although I’ll continue to photograph and write about this great land of ours as the mood strikes me. If you’d like to re-read any of my previous “Patriot’s Journey” posts, click on “archives” in the navigation bar on the right, then click on “Patriot’s Journey” and you’ll be directed to all of them. And I’m sure my fellow journeyers — Drumwaster, Larry at The Bastage, the folks at The Line Is Here and Shortbus from The Edge of Reason — would appreciate a visit, too. I’ve enjoyed participating in this year’s journey with some terrific bloggers and hope to do it again next year. ‘Til then, God bless America!

Something that never ceases to amaze me is the level of photographic talent shown by our military combat photographers, particularly those serving or who have recently served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Besides giving us a first hand, front line look at what our fighting men and women do and see, some of their work has to be be described as fine art.

During two tours in Iraq, one of the best was Staff Sergeant Russell Lee Klika (he goes by “Klika” - gotta love that name). In 2004, he accompanied the 278th Regimental Combat Team of the Tennessee Army National Guard, serving as a member of the public affairs staff. In 2006, he returned, this time with the 133rd Mobile Public Affairs Detachment of the Tennessee Army National Guard. During that second tour he worked with the 101st Airborne’s 3rd Division Rakkasans, a unit in which his 21-year-old son, Zachary, now serves. He occasionally sent photos of what he saw and I posted them on my old AFP website and later reposted them here.

Klika believes military photographers should not only document wars and battles, but also preserve and humanize historical events. So in capturing images in war-torn regions, he endured the same hardships and experienced the same risks as the warriors he photographed.

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Some of you know that Dawn and I live in a nice area between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe, much of it undeveloped and unspoiled. It’s one of the fastest growing cities in the tri-counties, yet local government and developers have managed to set aside a generous amount of land as natural habitat. For example, our home backs up to a natural creek, part of a protected strip of land that runs from high in the hills to the valley below providing refuge for a variety of wildlife. So it’s not unusual for us to see foxes, raccoons, wild turkeys, owls and an occasional coyote or deer in our yard. It’s what attracted us to the area — nice neighborhoods close to the city, yet still part of nature.

But every once in a while, nature interrupts our regular routine and last week was a perfect example. From our upstairs bedroom window, we’d been hearing “sounds” late at night and in the pre-dawn hours in our back yard, sounds we couldn’t identify. One night we thought we heard an animal attack and quickly dispose of another, not unusual in nature but something we weren’t used to hearing in our yard. Then, Saturday before last, while moving a deck chair from the garage to the back yard, Dawn heard something she hadn’t heard before — a sort of “growl”! She dropped the chair and raced into the house, but caught a glimpse of a dog-sized animal jumping from a tree near the creek at the rear edge of our property. I mistakenly assumed it had been a fox and dismissed it.

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In 1810, English poet William Wordsworth described a “sort of national property in which every man has a right and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy”. Painter George Catlin, in his travels though the American West, wrote in 1832 that the Native Americans in the United States might be preserved “by some great protecting policy of government … in a magnificent park … A nation’s park, containing man and beast, in all the wild and freshness of their nature’s beauty!”

Years later, in 1864, the first steps toward creating what would later become our national park system were set in motion by Congress and President Abraham Lincoln. Yosemite Valley, seen as an important national treasure, was set aside by the federal government and ceded to the state of California. In doing so, it was agreed that the state would preserve these lands for public use, resort and recreation, and that no corporate development would be allowed in the protected lands. Eight years later, Yosemite Valley, along with Yellowstone, became the world’s first National Parks.

Dawn and I are fortunate to live close enough to Yosemite for regular treks. With each visit, we marvel at its splendor, its magnificence, its massive beauty. Its sheer enormity provides a cornucopia of hiking and photographic opportunities, far more than we could hope to experience in a single lifetime.

It’s been said that one cannot visit Yosemite and not feel closer to his creator. For us, it’s true.

This is a Patriot’s Journey post. Remember to check out the other Patriotic Journeyers: Drumwaster, The Bastage, the folks at The Line Is Here and Shortbus from The Edge of Reason…