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 ⇐   June 22nd, 2014   ⇒ 

Copyright 2014 Michael Anttila

Yes, this picture is larger than normal. I received a new monitor at work, and this one is extra special: It is my first 4K UltraHD monitor! For those that don't know, 4K is the next "level up" from the standard HD formats we see today. A 4K monitor has twice the vertical and horizontal resolution of a 1080p monitor, which means that there are four times as many pixels.

At work, I will be using it to design complicated Xenio workflow graphs and for making sure that our products are ready in case the world collectively decides to advance to 4K broadcasting formats. However, my first task upon receiving the monitor was to find a suitable background image that would really show off the full resolution, so that people walking by can stop and gaze in amazement at the ridiculously beautiful detail possible in a 4K image.

After searching through the last year of photos, I settled upon this picture I took on my birthday last year in New York. It is a photo I took inside the Bethesda Terrace Arcade. I rotated and cropped it slightly and resized it to fit the 4K resolution so that I could use it as a background image. I decided to post it to my Picture Of The Week at full 4K resolution for two reasons: (1) So that you can get an idea of just how many pixels are involved with the 4K standard, and (2) so that the early adopters out there who actually have 4K monitors can use it as a test image themselves.

I'm really happy with this picture. Before, it was just a random shot I took while we were walking around Central Park that I haven't even looked at since. But now that I've been staring at it every day for the past week, I've really grown to love it... even the fact that it is not quite perfectly centered really adds to its charm, I think. I believe it was our tour guide who suggested I take a picture inside the arcade. I picked a spot and roughly centered myself between two columns, and then I waited for a while until there were no pedestrians and just snapped this photo without thinking too much about it. The camera wasn't level and I wasn't exactly centered between the columns, but with a little adjustment in photoshop I think it really turned out well.

To get an idea of just how big a 4K resolution is, compare the thumbnail image with all of the others from this year. For reference, most of the photos I post are 900 pixels across. This image is 3840 pixels across.

Technical Details: This photo was taken with my 5D Mark II + EF 17-40L at 40mm, ISO 1600, f/4 for 1/125th of a second.

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