Das größte Hamburg-Foto der Welt – powered by OTTO

For months, the OTTO project team had to wait for the perfect conditions to produce this photo: a cloudless sky, clear visibility and no wind. In June, they finally arrived. The technically complex shot of Germany’s largest panoramic photo took place at 120 metres above ground level, from the top of Hamburg’s St Nicholas Church. The result can be viewed as of now at www.hamburg-von-oben.de. Hamburg’s visitors and residents can discover the nicest corners of the Hanseatic city – sightseeing highlights, popular destinations and restaurant recommendations – from totally new perspectives and in high resolution thanks to the latest feat in photographic technology. In addition, there is an extensive photography guidebook for amateur photographers.

“With the ‘Hamburg From Above’ project we wanted to show our love for the city and for Web technologies, in our own way”, explains Kerstin Pape, Director of Online Marketing at OTTO. “As online retailers, at OTTO we enjoy innovative technologies, a rich variety of multimediaworlds and the marvellous opportunities of the social Web.”

For the launch of the page, OTTO is staging a digital treasure-hunt in Hamburg and has hidden OTTO parcels with gift vouchers within the shot of the city. In addition, several of Hamburg’s bloggers share their insider tips with visitors to the page. Numerous other activities will allow future visitors to hamburg-von-oben.de to add their own favourite locations and photos of Hamburg.

The key facts and figures about the record-breaking panorama:

• The shot is the largest panorama of a German city
• The photo is 100 gigapixels in size (450,000 x 225,000 pixels), which is the equivalent of 13,000 iPhone 6 pictures or 6,500 photos on a 16 megapixel DSLR
• The recording robot pushed the shutter release over 108,000 times
• The image was taken at a height of 120 metres, from the Church of St Nicholas
• Due to the data volume, copying, backing-up, sorting and selecting the images took three days
• It took five days in total to disguise all of the recognisable faces and number plates
• The original image file is 297 gigabytes in size and could only be processed on a supercomputer
  
• If you were to print out the image in photo quality, the resulting picture would be 16 metres long and 8 metres wide.
  

Im SinFor data protection, all vehicle number plates and faces were retouched during the time-consuming production phase of the gigapixel image. The gigapixel photo was produced by the Dresden-based agency A.F.B. media.