Cain's Coulee Overlook at Makoshika State Park near Glendive, Montana. → Buy a Print or License Photo
More and more clients are asking for (even demanding) higher and higher resolution photos of Montana for special projects. Some of you know I created a high resolution panorama photo of Ryan Dam outside of Great Falls, Montana. That images now hangs inside Great Falls International Airport and is 11 feet tall and 60-some feet wide. I also recently sold several photographs for a new corporate headquarters that will end up being 9 feet tall and 14 feet wide. Not every photograph is capable of printing quite so large, though.
The average professional dSLR camera today makes an image that is approximately 20 megapixels. If you were to print that photo at its native resolution, assuming it hasn't been cropped, the largest photo you could print at its native resolution and maintain ultimate clarity is only 19.2 inches by 12.8 inches in size.
To overcome this I am now making many new photos using a higher resolution camera that captures images that are 50.6 megapixels. However, for super large images that still isn't enough. So in those cases I will take as many as 9 to 24 images of a scene and stitch them together. The image above required 9 individual 50.6 megapixel photographs, which were stitched together to make one massive 32,000 x 8700 pixel sized image. And to show off that clarity of those images on my website I'm using some new software as you can see above. The largest file I can upload to my website is 1500 pixels wide. The image above is 8000 pixels wide. That's a far cry from the 32,000 pixels wide the original image is, but it does show in greater detail how much clarity and resolution is available in any given image.
