The newest number for the record books is 71 gigapixels.  A team called 360world put together this absolutely staggering panoramic shot of Budapest that you could easily get lost in for hours. 

It's a hillside with a city in the background, nothing too shocking here.  But once you start zooming in, you'll get more detail.  You can find skydivers in mid flight, children at play, and even a man on top of what looks like a radio tower - a radio tower that's barely visible until you start zooming.

The full picture would be over 150 meters wide, and will almost certainly never be printed in its full size.  The Erzsébet lookout station, which is where the photo was taken from, will host a 15 meter wide print.

World's Most Expensive Lens?

Leica Rumors reports that this Leica Apo-Telyt-R 1:5.6/1600mm is for sale for US$2,064,489. At the current exchange rate that converts to about R20M.

Jan 2009

World's Fastest Lens

The Leica Noctilux has a maximum aperture of ƒ/0.95, matching the speed of the S-mount Canon lens of 1961 to put it in a tie for fastest production lens ever made for pictorial photography.

Sep 2008

Simon Hoegsberg, a photographer from Denmark, spent 17 months making a single continuous print that is 100 meters long. It's called "We're All Gonna Die—100 Meters of Existence." The photograph features 178 people shot over the course of 20 days, in Berlin.

WORLD'S BIGGEST PHOTO

Lucy Moore standing in the centre of the 112,896 photograph mosaic which the artist Helen Marshall put together with mosaic specialist PollyTiles. It measures 30 meters by 30 meters.
Aug 2008

Historian Larry Schaaf stunned the world when he said in a Sotheby's catalogue that The Leaf was in fact Thomas Wedgwood's (1771-1805) picture. Previously it was credited to William Henry Fox Talbot and thought to be taken in 1839, when in fact it was taken a lot earlier.

June 2008

100 YEAR OLD AUTOCHROME 10

Autochromes are amongst the world's oldest and rarest colour pictures. This one by Edward Steichen dates back to 1908.

WORLD'S BEST SPORTS PHOTOGRAPH?

WORLD’S MOST EXPENSIVE PHOTOGRAPH

Just a day after the Resale Right for Artists was introduced in the UK,
the world record for the highest price paid for a photograph was set
when The Pond - Moonlight by Edward Steichen was sold in the US for £1.6 million breaking quite spectacularly the previous record set just last November when Richard Prince's Untitled (Cowboy) was sold at auction for £720,000.

Had the sale of The Pond - Moonlight taken place in the UK, the
purchaser (whose name has not been disclosed) and the seller would have been liable to pay Steichen's estate a resale royalty of about £9,000 due to the introduction of the Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006.
Surely a drop in the ocean for anyone in the market for such a valuable piece?

MONSTER LENS
Carl Zeiss  announced a totally unique 'monster lens', the built-to-order Zeiss Apo Sonnar T* 1700 mm F4 lens. Designed to be used with a Hasselblad 6x6 medium format camera this monster lens weighs in at 256 kg and uses unique methods for handling focusing. This lens becomes the largest telephoto lens for non-military use anywhere in the world.
Sep 2006

Top Magazine Cover

Leopold Mannes and Leo Godowsky, the inventors of Kodachrome, timed their intricate processing sequences by whistling the final movement of Brahms C-minor Symphony

AT THE AUCTIONS

Photographer Andreas Gursky's "Paris, Montparnasse, 1993" was sold for $600,000 in mid-November, a world auction record for a contemporary photograph. The amount was double the existing record set for Gursky.  (His previous record was $310,500 for "Prada III, 1998," sold at Phillips de Pury & Luxembourg.)
Gursky's image was one of three photographers' work which hit record highs at the Christie's sale of contemporary art in Rockefeller Center, New York City. Gursky, Rineke Dijkstra and Bernd & Hilla Becher all fetched world auction records, says Christie's.
Fourteen photographs by German artists from the Hans Grothe Collection were up for auction, including a series of 22 images by Bernd & Hilla Becher, which sold for $160,000, a record high for the two photographers.
German shooter Thomas Demand equaled his existing auction record when his 1997 work "Scheune (Barn)" was sold for $99,500. Other record-breakers were Rineke Dijkstra's three portraits of post-partum women, which fetched $105,000. The images were bought by anonymous bidders.
                                              Dec 2001

WORLD'S MOST EXPENSIVE PAINTING

Graham Nash, of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young fame, owns the world's largest scanner. He’s been taking pictures long before he became a singer and he has been doing digital imaging since 1989.

WORTH IT'S WEIGHT IN GOLD

A copy of Helmut Newton's book Sumo has been sold at an auction for a record R2m ($304,000). The book comes with its own stand because is weighs 30kg. It has been signed by many of the celebrities appearing in the book.

Leica president and CEO recently presented Czechoslovakia president Vaclav Havel with a Leica M6 with serial number 2,500,000. Some other recipients include Leica number 150,000 to Leopold Godowksy and number 175,000 to Leopold Mannes, the inventors of Kodachrome (1935) ; Leica 300,000 to Gustav Wilmanns and number 350,000 to Wilhelm Schneider, the inventors of Agfacolor film. Dr. Ernest Leitz received number 500,000 in 1950 and in 1955 Henri-Cartier Bresson got number 750,000 on the occasion of the Biennale de Photographie in Paris.

The highest price Christies has been paid for a camera was £55,750  for a 1882 Enjalbert revolver camera. It was made in Paris and is extremely rare - less than 10 of them being in museums worldwide.