About

I shoot ultra-large panoramas — single images stitched from hundreds or thousands of long-lens frames, ending up tens of gigapixels in size. Where a normal photo shows you a view, these let you stand inside one and zoom until you find the detail nobody noticed was there.

Most of it is an excuse to build things. The panoramas are captured by a robotic head I designed and built myself: two stepper motors for yaw and pitch, a microcontroller nudging the camera frame by frame across the sky while I enjoy the view. The stitching runs on a server with more RAM than sense. The viewer rendering these pages is my own, written from scratch, loading only the tiles you're actually looking at.

When the panoramic head is clicking away on a mountain and I have two hours with nothing to do, I tend to start calculating what it would take to do something even more absurd. That is how a 44-gigapixel image starts to feel small, and how a thought experiment about breaking the terapixel barrier ends up on a website.

The name googolplex1.de is a leftover from a younger version of this page that opened with a rant about how absurdly large the number googolplex is. The rant is gone; the appetite for absurd numbers, clearly, is not. Because a googolplex is hard to spell if you've never met one, these days the site mostly goes by the easier meieralex.com, with a handful of shorter aliases like alx.fyi.

Everything here is shot, built, and processed by me.