A few weeks ago I was sitting in an airplane with mountains going by outside the window, and idly snapped a few pictures. They weren’t bad, and I wondered about printing one.
I consulted with my neighbor Scott August, who when not being an artist has a high-quality printing business, and asked him how big we could go. Here’s how big:
That’s a chair behind it, holding it up.
To my highly-biased eye it looks wonderful.
It’s 40 by 50 inches, more or less. I left all the grain in and Scott printed it on canvas and they sort of cancel each other out. If I were doing this again I might go with paper because my feelings about the loss of grain are mixed. Anyhow, it’ll go up on the wall either at the house or the cabin, soon.
Bear in mind that I shot this with my Canon S100 “pocket camera”. Next time you’re reading a camera review and someone says that with X megapixels you could really only print Y inches big, I bet the Y/X ratio here is bigger than that.
Of course, I shot this illustration with my big SLR and an expensive 30mm Sigma wide-angle lens, for optimal reproduction. <snicker>
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Bruce Walker (Sep 06 2012, at 18:09)
The wide format printers that do these are really adept at up-rezzing I've found. Anything I've printed on paper or canvas so far has looked just stupendous, and with no visible pixellation. So I'm not surprised this came out well. Plus the subject matter suits going big: not a lot of super-fine detail.
This should look really great on your wall, Tim!
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From: Bud Gibson (Sep 06 2012, at 19:44)
I concur with Bruce. The true beauty of this photo is the shapes, repeating patterns, and subtle monochromatic color play. Lots of little details, and you might have been in trouble.
I like what you have here a lot. I'd hang it on my wall.
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From: Peter Korn (Sep 06 2012, at 20:03)
I'm an S100 fan as well - it is my travel camera. Lately I've been taking it under water as well. See https://plus.google.com/photos/109915568489541328254/albums/5775318197738982353 for some recent S100 underwater photos.
After "backscatter removal", I'm thinking of printing https://plus.google.com/photos/109915568489541328254/albums/5775318197738982353/5775318333186012690 rather large...
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From: Justin Watt (Sep 06 2012, at 20:10)
It's funny that you chose to print that, as that photograph made me think about whether I should double my collection of Tim Bray photographs...
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From: Tony Fisk (Sep 08 2012, at 19:26)
A troubled ocean, frozen in a frame...
(through a plane window yet!)
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