Look at the image above. Pretty nice picture of the Golden Gate Bridge, huh? It's actually a pretty nice picture of a $330,000 car, the Bentley Mulsanne. You can't see the vehicle at this distance, but you can visit Bentley's website and yourself. It goes from panoramic view of the bridge, all the way down to a close-up of stitching of the Bentley logo on the passenger headrest. The carmaker says it fitted together 70 individual photographs to create the image, using the same technology developed by NASA to make panoramas from photographs beamed back by the Curiosity rover on Mars. The resulting image of the Mulsanne contains 53 billion pixels (that's 53,000 megapixels) and Bentley says that if printed out it would be the same size as a football field.

GigaPan's robotic camera mounts can help spit out pictures to create fantastically detailed panoramic photos.

The carmaker created the image to highlight the 'attention to detail' it puts into its products. And sure, if you're buying a vehicle that costs around six times the average US annual salary (and that's before adding in any extras), you're probably right to expect more than the usual level of polish.

Still, if I had that sort of money I'd probably skip the Bentley altogether and try and buy some of that NASA tech for myself. Who fancies a replica Curiosity ATV? The supercars of the Geneva Motor Show.

Fine photography - truly fine photography, the kind you find hanging in galleries, and not adorning the average Web page, is art. Twenty years ago, it was a documentary, an indelible record of a snapshot in time. With the emergence of digital photography, we can't absolutely be certain of the veracity of an image. But any doubts we might have, living in the age of Photoshop, can be alleviated with the possibilities that digital photography also offers. By that, of course, I mean gigapixel imagery. At this point, save for the, gigapixel imagery requires careful planning, an eye for detail, and a lot more work on the back end than you might imagine.

Each 'gigapixel' image is carefully composed of possibly thousands of smaller images. In the largest gigapixel images, however, these 'small' images may be individual shots made up of 20-megpixel images. In many cases, special robotic mounts are used, carefully exposing shot after shot after moving a predefined period of arc. Later, all of the shots are 'stitched' together by computer, which attempts to digitally match the edges of each image with its neighbor, producing a composite whose individual pieces blur into and are indistinguishable from each other. The process can take days.

The process is complicated by the fact that wind, weather, and the simple time it takes to compose the shot can alter the light. Photographers creating a multi-gigapixel image of Seville, Spain were horrified to discover that their shot - composed, as most are, high up in the sky - was being altered by the blowing of the wind. Recently, British Telecom and partner 360Cities, which specializes in panoramic photos, shot 48,640 individual frames that were digitally collated into a single panorama. All told, the shot required 320 GB of data - the largest, most complex digital photo ever taken. But it might not be the best. We've found some, in fact, that we think are better. Click in the 'Image' to explore each one.