I Printed a Wall Sized Photograph.

Today I'm going to be printing one of the largest prints I've ever printed and what better subject matter than to use one of the largest trees in all of America. So we are out here at the angel oak which is one of the largest and oldest trees in all of America. I think from a wingspan of its branches it's actually the largest tree. It's about four to five hundred years old and this thing is kind of a staple if you're in South Carolina especially around the Charleston area. You got to come out to angel oak at least once to see this thing. Now to capture this entire tree I could shoot incredibly wide and get a single 24 or maybe 50 megapixel image but instead what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be zooming in a little bit more between 50 millimeters and 70 millimeters and then I'm going to take a series of vertical shots and stitch them all together so that I can wind up with a massive image that might be 150 megapixels which is going to be perfect for printing images that might be as big as four or seven feet wide. So angel oak is notorious for not allowing tripods or monopods so you're gonna have to do everything handheld and the trick to this if you want to do a vertical pano stitch image is that you want to keep the camera almost as if it's right above a monopod so I'm going to pivot my body around and take vertical shots without moving the camera too much. Now let's talk about camera settings real quick. The nice thing about angel oak is it's going to be so far from the camera because it's such a wide shot that it's not as important as you would think so you could shoot this wide open at 2.8 but today I'm going to be shooting at f5.6 which is going to allow this lens to be a little bit sharper than wide open. I'm going to be shooting at iso 400 which is going to give me a pretty noise-free image and then I need a shutter that's just fast enough that I can hand hold it while also not letting the leaves register a blur and today we're right at 1 over 1 25th of a second. Now as I'm scouting my location and getting the pictures that I need there are a ton of people here which means when I stitch everything together I'm going to have to photoshop everyone out if I want the photo to look like I'm the only person at the angel oak but they just announced that there's a wedding here that's going to last 15 minutes and they've asked everyone to move away from the tree which has actually given me about a 5 to 10 minute window where I can take pictures with no one in the scene whatsoever so this has kind of been a blessing in disguise. Now every time you come out to angel oak you can get a different lighting event you can get different foliage different leave colors right now it's a little overcast but every 15 or 20 minutes you get these nice backlit rays coming through the tree and it looks incredible so it's kind of a game of patience where I'm trying to manage both the people that are here but also capturing an image that doesn't look entirely flat. If you go look at angel oak on google you can find hundreds of images and they're all just kind of mediocre but if I can be patient enough and have the light really shining through the leaves I think I can wind up with something that is worthy of printing this large in the first place. One thing that's a little frustrating here is that they have ruined the natural beauty of the tree by putting up physical barriers to keep people from climbing the tree and they've also put a bunch of different signs which are going to look horrible in the photographs so all of that needs to be photoshopped out before I send this final image to the printer. Once I had my final image stitched retouched and ready for printing I uploaded the final ultra high res image to the luma prints online dashboard. Here I designed three unique products one being a massive 115 inch rolled canvas print and the other being a more traditional frame fine art piece with white matte board and a three inch wooden frame. But what arrived at my doorstep sent me into a slight panic. Oh my gosh this is so much heavier and bigger than I thought. This print is so large I'm having to roll it on a dolly because it weighs I think it weighs 120 pounds. How is this possible? I feel like I might have made a mistake but so let's go ahead and open this up. This is the framed print and hopefully a lot of this weight is the internal packaging but if this thing truly weighs 100 pounds this is going to be a two-man maybe three-man job to get this on the wall and actually hang this properly so let's see what's All right let's see what this thing looks like. Okay that's why it weighs so much. This print is embedded in some plywood. I guess you guys are going to get to see this before even me. Let's lift this bad boy up. Whoa yeah that is classy. Look at that heck yeah. It's always going to be difficult to show print quality on camera and this is my first time even seeing this but this is gosh this turned out so much better than even I thought. So the wood that I chose for this is called espresso gold and it's got I don't know if it really has gold in it it almost has like a copper look to it. So it took a little bit of effort to get to this point but wow this might be not only the largest print that I've ever done but one of the most beautiful prints that I've ever done. So one thing that's going through my mind right now is this print was supposed to just be done to show you guys what a framed print can look like and I was most excited about the raw rolled canvas print because that's going to be the largest print out of all of them. But now that I see this finished final product I think this is the flagship image. We'll have to see. I'll get them both mounted and you guys can be the judge. The other one's going to be really impressive because it's going to take up the entire wall but this one this looks absolutely stunning. So I want to roll out the rolled canvas just so that you can see how massive this next print is because this is the one that I'm most excited about. All right here we go. Whoa look at that. Wow. So if the frame print is over five feet long this one is close to nine maybe even close to ten feet. It's almost double the size and of probably double the height as well. So this is the one I'm most excited about just because I've never printed anything this large. I'm excited to get this installed but I have to say I think the frame print is the one I'm most excited about now that I see it here in person. This is just absolutely beautiful. I also ordered a third print. This one is the metal print offering and it measures 24 inches wide which is much more reasonable in size. These metal prints are best for those who want something rigid that can be hung immediately without a frame and they offer a more contemporary look and feel compared to traditional canvas and photo paper. All right so now that we got everything opened up and we've seen exactly what we have to work with I'm going to spend the next couple hours measuring everything checking for studs and making sure that I know exactly how I can mount these. I might even be installing some track lighting or some kind of additional lighting just to make these really pop off the wall. So the next time that you see me we'll be looking at the final installations and we'll see just how impactful printing massive prints can be for your space. So as I've been prepping the large canvas print to install that I've actually been installing that earlier today. I was trying to figure out where to put this print and this print actually wound up being much larger and more beautiful than I really imagined and so I actually in some ways think that this is the better installation. I wound up putting it just over here we have this like cabinet here that holds a bunch of photo gear and I think this turned out great. Now it is a little weird having the same print in multiple different locations but this one is in a more public spot where I think people are going to see it every time they come in this room and it just seems to fit the decor a little bit better. So now let's transition over to the lounge we have a record player we have a vinyl collection we have some guitars and amps it's just a really cool space that needs something to completely push it over the top and I think hanging this massive nine foot canvas is going to completely change the vibe of that room. So here's what the wall looks like with just the natural light it's very dim and I don't think the print will pop off the wall without some additional lighting so what I decided to do was install a track lighting system that will use zoomable spotlights to selectively light the canvas print. I'll put a link to these lights in the description below because not only are they dimmable but they can zoom from 60 degrees to 15 degrees which is awesome for this specific application. Oh and they are also tri-color so you can perfectly adjust the white balance to fit your mood. Hanging the print was a bit easier than I thought I just marked the middle of the room and the middle of the print and tacked it straight into the drywall then I worked my way towards the edges using marks that were perfectly level. The goal for this installation was for it to be sort of deconstructed like a poster print. Framing something 10 feet wide by 4 feet tall just isn't practical for a number of reasons. So even with these track lights zoomed all the way into 15 they still spill a lot of light around the room. So I've bought these grids off of Amazon and these are going to pop right on top of here maybe I can cut them down and actually put them in there and just like photography grids these are going to control the spill of the light. As I tilt this around you can see it either lets all the light in or it's going to cut the light as we get to further angles. Now the crazy thing about these is for five of these it cost me about 25 bucks so each one of these is five dollars and while these are extremely common for photographers to use in their lighting this is not a common thing in the commercial lighting world which blows my mind. So there's got to be a company out there that uses aluminum grid material like this for their speed lights that should be marketing towards interior designers because these are incredibly useful for commercial or interior lighting applications like this. All right so here is the final print this takes up this entire wall which really sets the mood for this room and gives it a completely different feel. This is kind of like a record music part of the studio. Now I know the camera makes it look like this area up here is a little bit overexposed but I promise you when you're in here this is actually dimmed down pretty low and I put the highlight on the brightest part of the image which is where the sun was kind of coming through the leaves up there. We use some neutral density filters we use some spot grids and I've also dimmed down the lights just a little bit so that when you walk in here the whole wall isn't the main light source. In fact it actually looks really dim in here even with a couple other lamps and lights in this room but I think if you do it like this where you dim the lights down and accent them perfectly on the print it makes the print come alive off the wall but it doesn't light up the whole room so that it's overbearingly bright and it doesn't scream photo studio or art studio or museum. It feels really comfortable and it feels really really soft and warm. Now one thing that I did that I really like is I used two of the track lights and pointed them straight down so they would illuminate the furniture so that you could still have this really subdued moody lighting but you would also have a practical light that would allow you to see exactly what you're doing and not be stranded in the dark. So there you go the largest print that I have ever personally printed and installed. If you guys want any of the materials that I used in this video, the lights, the grids, and of course if you want to print your own massive prints through LumaPrints head to the links in the description below. I have everything detailed there. If you guys enjoy content like this make sure you subscribe to our channel below. Also if you're a photographer and you want to participate in our critique the community photo contest head to fstoppers.com slash contest. Every month we feature different genres of photography and then we give away some really interesting photo related prizes. And if you're a photographer and you want to really up your game or if you're looking to make photography your full-time business head over to fstoppers.com slash store where you can check out our full-length photography tutorials. If you're looking to create a business with your photography and want to start shooting headshots, weddings, real estate photography, product shots, you can definitely find all of that. Or maybe you just like shooting for fun and you want to take better landscape or macro wildlife photography we have that covered as well. And finally I'd like to thank LumaPrints for sponsoring this video and allowing me to finally fill this wall with the largest print possible. This is something I should have done a long time ago.