The Phoenix Sun

South Africa’s Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden is one of the most beautiful — and the most important — gardens in the world. Created in 1913, Kirstenbosch was the first botanical garden devoted to the conservation of indigenous plants and trees. Today, Kirstenbosch boasts several thousand species, some rare and endangered and a few that are extinct in the wild. The sprawling garden is difficult to capture in images. (Although I’ve tried — see my book of Kirstenbosch photos below.) The best collections of photos produce a mosaic conveying something of Kirstenbosch’s eclectic beauty. That’s great, but frustrating to photographers who want more.

That’s where GigaPan technology shines. Using a robotic invented for NASA, the GigaPan unit creates a massive photo by stitching together individual images to form one enormous one. I took the image above at Kirstenbosch last August, combining 126 photos to make an image that when printed will measure 66-feet wide by 13-feet high. (Yes, I hope to print it someday — maybe reduced to “just” 31′ by 6′).

Look for individual flowers, people, or animals by zooming in using the controls on the left. Or click on the “snapshots” to be taken automatically to the subject shown.

Scientists have been using GigaPan to identify insects in the rain forest and for other research. The device — which is priced from $300 — also gives photographers a powerful new tool to create giant panoramas with incredible detail.

Visit the GigaPan Store

Kirstenbosch: Africa’s Garden by Osha Gray Davidson |

When people go on photo-safaris, it’s usually to capture images of large mammals like lions, giraffes, elephants, and gorillas. I understand the draw: these are magnificent animals. (Full disclosure: I spent three years diving with, photographing, and writing about sea turtles.)

But there’s a whole other kingdom out there that we often overlook: plants. Africa is brimming with an incredible diversity of plant life.

The Cape Floral Kingdom

Nearly half of all plant species found in the southern half of the continent exist on one tiny sliver of land surrounding Cape Town, South Africa. The Cape Floral Kingdom is home to an astonishing 6,200 species of plants found nowhere else on earth.

Located on the slopes of Cape Town’s Table Mountain, Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens is the heart of this unique kingdom. Only indigenous plants are grown here; in fact Kirstenbosch was established in 1913 to preserve the unique species of the Kingdom. Today, Kirstenbosch is recognized as one most the most important botanical gardens is the world.

Few people outside of South Africa have heard of this world-class treasure, and far fewer will ever get the opportunity to visit the garden at the very bottom of the African continent.

A View of the Garden

My plan is to visit Kirstenbosch and document as much of it as I can, allowing people to “visit” the gardens through the images I take, using everything from macro- to GigaPan photography.

I’ll make these images available in several ways. I’ll create a website devoted to the Kirstenbosch Gardens with the bulk of the photographs. The enormous GigaPan photos will be posted to the GigaPan gallery for exploration. I’ll also place them on Google Earth for viewing there.

I’ll print some of the best images and send them to project donors.

I’ll collect the best of the best images into a full-color bound catalog and send them to top donors.

Oh, one more thing: I plan on buying seeds from the Kirstenbosch collection and, if U.S. Customs allows, giving packets to donors so that you can experience a living part of Africa’s garden!

Thanks for reading about my project. If you like the idea, please consider passing the word on, via Facebook, twitter and other social media.

Go to the Kirstenbosch Project Page.

If you’ve already seen GigaPan panoramas on Google Earth, you know how amazing and powerful this technology is. If you haven’t seen it in action, you should. And here’s your chance, Southwestern style.

The GigaPan apparatus is a robot designed to create data-rich images that can be viewed at full resolution only on computers (the prints would be the size of a billboard depending on how many individual shots are stitched together. Here’s my image of the amazing petroglyphs at Deer Valley Rock Art Center in north Phoenix, combining 21 zoomed-in photos.

Not a whole lot to see, right? Now view it at the GigaPan site. Oh, yeah.

Want to see it in situ? Try viewing it on Google Earth: View in Google Earth 4.2+.

I bought the GigaPan for a Kickstarter project photographing one of the most important botanical gardens on Earth: Kirstenbosch in South Africa. It’s an awesome place. (There’s more information about the Gardens at my Kickstarter page — just follow the link in the previous sentence. (And if you feel so inclined, I encourage you to support for this project. You’ll notice there are lots of cool rewards for pledges — that’s how Kickstarter works.)

I’ll be writing more about the GigaPan technology in my Forbes blog soon. For now, I’ll just play with my new toy…I mean, practice my technique with this new photographic tool.

Cheers!