If you attended Barack Obama’s inauguration, you may be able to find yourself in a super-cool, panoramic crowd photo taken by photographer David Bergman. You can zoom in from a great distance and still see high-resolution snapshots.

The high-tech story about how the photo came to be:

I made a panoramic image showing the nearly two million people who watched President Obama’s inaugural address. To do so, I clamped a Gigapan Imager to the railing on the north media platform about six feet from my photo position. The Gigapan is a robotic camera mount that allows me to take multiple images and stitch them together, creating a massive image file.

My final photo is made up of 220 Canon G10 images and the file is 59,783 X 24,658 pixels or 1,474 megapixels. It took more than six and a half hours for the Gigapan software to put together all of the images on my Macbook Pro and the completed TIF file is almost 2 gigabytes.

Bergman is selling prints of the panoramic shot. You gotta love it — capitalism at its best, even in the Obama administration.

(Hat tip to AmSpecBlog)