Check Out These Stunning 50 Megapixel iPhone Panorama Images Shot from a Plane

Imagine strapping an iPhone 7 to the bottom of an airplane, placing the camera into Panorama mode, and then flying around and capturing giant sweeping panorama images of the ground as you fly over it. The images would probably look pretty amazing, right? Well there’s no reason to imagine what they’d look like, because one photographer did exactly that.

It might sound crazy, but yes professional photographer Vincent Laforet placed an iPhone camera-down on the bottom of a plane and then flew around to create very large scale panoramic images as seen from 20,000 feet.

Vincent Laforet worked on the remarkable project with Apple and is now sharing the images online via his Instagram account. Along with the images posted he explains details of the project as follows:

“For 7 consecutive days I will be posting a series of 50+ Megapixel Panoramic Photographs shot on an @apple iPhone 7, from the belly of a LearJet from 20,000 feet above the earth.

We set the standard Camera App to “Pano” Mode and flew for 2-7 minutes at 220+ Knots on a perfectly straight line and we witnessed the iPhone effectively paint the landscape like a roller brush.

It produced a stunningly high quality image that I’d never before seen before from any smartphone! This project was commissioned by Apple to push the boundaries of what an iPhone can produce and to capture the beauty of our world from above.

This project is a follow up to my photography book “AIR” of cities around the world at night that I photographed from a helicopter at very high altitudes. The next logical step was to go higher … in this case twice as high in a jet! Enjoy and please feel free to share!”

You can check out the first Instagram post from the series here

A handful of the panorama images from the series have been posted thus far, with more reported to come.

Day 2 of 7 Dead Horse Point State Park, Utah For 7 consecutive days I will be posting a series of 50+ Megapixel Panoramic Photographs shot on an @apple iPhone 7, from the belly of a LearJet from 20,000 feet above the earth. We set the standard Camera App to “Pano” Mode and flew for 2-7 minutes at 220+ Knots on a perfectly straight line and we witnessed the iPhone effectively paint the landscape like a roller brush. It produced a stunningly high quality image that I’d never before seen before from any smartphone! This project was commissioned by Apple to push the boundaries of what an iPhone can produce and to capture the beauty of our world from above. This project is a follow up to my photography book “AIR” of cities around the world at night that I photographed from a helicopter at very high altitudes. The next logical step was to go higher … in this case twice as high in a jet! Enjoy and please feel free to share!

A post shared by Vincent Laforet (@vincentlaforet) on Jan 15, 2018 at 12:28pm PST

You’ll have to scroll sideways through Instagram images to see the full pictures, which otherwise display as squares because of the nature of Instagram posts. Perhaps the photographer will post the full sized 50 megapixel images elsewhere at some point, but for now just enjoy the Instagram posts as they are fantastic.

The same photographer has also worked on a similar aerial project before, called “33K” which the has a rather stunning 4k video available to watch on Vimeo and has been embedded below for easy viewing. For optimal enjoyment, place this one into full screen mode and make sure it’s 1080p or 4k resolution, it’s really quite something:

If you feel inspired to try something similar yourself, you’ll need a plane (or some other creative flying machine, maybe a drone, or a UFO if you’re from outer space), an iPhone, and of course you will want to use the Panorama camera feature on iPhone. Have fun!

Heads up to Steven who sent this in to us via Kottke.org.