Health Care Fine Art

When to use Panoramas

This morning I have been working with two Interior Designers (Amy Pressman & Judy Girod) to come up with images to fill entire walls. Each of these separate HealthCare projects has walls that are much wider than they are tall; about 30-feet wide by 6-feet tall.

Most photographic images fit an Aspect Ratio of 3:2. If you crop a single image down to 5:1 you don’t have much of the original image left and what’s left with suffers from excessive enlargement.

The solution to this is to use images that were created to fit a wide aspect ratio: Panoramas. With the transition from film to digital cameras, this has become much easier. Photographers can now set up their cameras on a tripod to take a series of images from left to right. Those images can then be “stitched” together digitally in the computer and you end up with a panorama.

For example, the picture above was created from 6 individual images. Suddenly I have gone from a 16.7 megapixels (which, after cropping would only be about 4 megapixels) to a an 85 megapixel image. Since there is about 20 x as much data to work with, it tolerates a lot more enlargement.

Amy Pressman is an Interior Designer and owner of Pressman Design Studio

Judy Girod who is Director of Interior Design at Lothrop Associates Architects. Amy and Judy both have extensive experience in selecting art for HealthCare facilities. You can see some of my Panoramas in my Panorama Gallery.

How big can a picture can be enlarged?

I often get asked to make pictures big; sometimes VERY big.

For example this week I'm having a print of a single coneflower installed in Georgia. It's over 26-feet wide. Some pictures go big better than others.  There are a lot of issues behind this, mostly technical stuff like megapixels and very careful attention to technique. 

Part of the issue is the subject matter. Some things go big better than others. Landscapes with a lot of fine detail (leaves and blades of grass) are harder to enlarge than close-ups of flowers. Hence the coneflower in the picture above enlarged well. There are primarily two things that go wrong with images that are enlarged too much:

1. They can show “pixelation” where the edges of things can start to show "jaggies"
2. They can appear out-of-focus or blurry.

Viewing distance is another variable that is critical. If the typical viewer is going to be 5-feet or more from the print, then they won't be able to see the flaws. But if you look at a huge print (a billboard for example) from 5-inches away, it will look like nonsense.

So how big can a picture be enlarged? It depends on each image and on the viewing distance. You have to take it on a case-by-case basis.

Note: the 26-foot wide Coneflower image was printed by MDC Wallcovering on vinyl and was applied like wallpaper