A really BIG Photographic Canvas print!

I have mentioned this 4m Photographic canvas image a few times in previous posts, but i wanted it to be up on the wall before putting it on the blog,  it seemed only fair that the client should see it first, especially since it has been so long in the making.

I was pretty excited when i got an order for a 4m image, a vertical one at that, i’d never printed anything so big and i was very keen to try it.  I was confident the image would would print up well, it was shot on a large format panoramic camera, a Fuji GX 617 on a 6 x 17 cm piece of transparency film (Fuji Velvia), like most of the images in my gallery.  It was then scanned at 3200 dpi and 16 bit on an Imacon 848 scanner to over 900Mb, so there was tons of fine detail and information to work with.  The finished layered file came in at 2.9Gb… Thats a lot of hard drive space for one image.

My printer is an Epson 9900, which is 111cm wide (44″), so i can print an image of this format (3:1 ratio) to about 3m long… not big enough for this one.  So i called my friend Paul Parin from Studio Red Dust, who has an Epson 11880, the big brother to my printer.  The Epson 11880 can print to 152cm wide (60″) and with the right software and the right person driving it, for as long an image as you could want.  Paul is very proffesional and really knows how to drive his printer, so the results were spectacular.

The timber for the stretcher frame had to be custom made, and Nigel from Bitches Brew Picture Framers, who shares the gallery space with me, had  a few sleepless nights worrying about stretching this monster before clearing a space on the gallery floor and tackling the job.

My delivery van has a maximum  length of 3m it can  fit in the cargo area, so last Saturday i hired a truck and delivered this 4m long image to its new home, where Rob, from Master Art Display and myself put it into its final location.

Each of these images of the stretching and hanging of the 4m photographic canvas print were taken on the Canon 5D Mk II with the 17mm f4L tilt shift lens to keep the perspective and gain some unusual focal planes (click on the images for a closer look).  The last image was not taken by me, since i am in the shot, but by Rob the Picture hanging expert, who also happens to be pretty handy with a camera.