Last time I checked (30 seconds ago) 9000 x 6600 was 59.4 Million, not 6 Million.
But that doesn’t matter, since you don’t need 300 pixels per inch - 100 is more than enough, and that’s 6.6 Mpixels.
I was going by 60 million, not 6 million. But then, I thought “megapixels” was a term for a squared ratio, not a linear one.
Check out www.redbubble.com - you can upload your artwork and they take care of the printing for you.
I’m an emulsion freak 'til I die.
Short answer - call a photographer. Have her/him do one, note what she/he uses, copy (also: watch where a really good photographer sets up, then put your tripod in his/her tripod’s indentions! Steal all intelluctual… anyway…)
If you want DIY: emulsion or digital, you need light - nice, smooth, even, glare-free light. The answer is “copystand” - see ebay. Before megascannners, large items were placed on the board, the lights adjusted, and the shutter clicked.
With everybody looking at digital (nice, clean, diy) vs. emulsion (what do you mean - it has to be DARK?!) and saying “digital is close enough”, all photo gear is dirt cheap - including massive copystands.
A 4x5 is excellent - locally, to develop a sheet is $3 - printing is a bit more…
I have an old Sinar F ($400) and a couple of really nice lenses - figure $200 for an adequate 90mm. Use an old (film) SLR as a meter - it will give you the settings for the shutter.
A medium format might get you to 16x20 (inch) print - Mamiya looks good (I have a medium-format back for the Sinar - I can shoot 6 cm / 2 1/4" directly from it).
Truly large prints require lots of bits of color - be they emulsion grains or digital pixels, you have to get them from somewhere.
Either way - get a copystand - for top-of-line, now dirt cheap, Polaroid MP-4.
I guess I have to disagree with one small part here.
For large format the initial cost for equipment will be no higher than the number you quoted, and possibly less. For $1500, I would imagine you’d get a view camera, film holders, a normal lens, and tripod. I’d bet you could probably also get a telephoto, or moderate wide angle too. Reputable dealers like KEH and B&H have scads of LF cameras listed, and you can find bargains on ebay all the time.
I agree with the overall advice given by everyone to do this digitally. But for any lurker who’s interested in analogue LF photography, the cost of equipment is pretty affordable.
Another hint.
If you are using a tripod and you are able to set your film down to 64, use the self timer with your camera. That way, you pressing the shutter button doesn’t move the camera while the shutter is operating.
Is your last name McHottness or McBabeness?
You’re right - but the same concept applies to used digital gear. The biggest killer is going to be the usage costs. Large format film is pricy, and so is processing and scanning. In Philadelphia, a 50 sheet box of 4x5 film would cost me about $110. A local lab charges $3 per sheet for processing, and $20 per sheet for scanning. That’s about $25 per exposure. Of course, a decent flatbed like an Epson V700 is cheaper in the long run, but it adds an extra $500 or so up front, plus an additional learning curve on top of the view camera.
I’m not bashing film - I prefer many of film’s aesthetics and use a medium format SLR myself, but I’m always aware that for the money I’ve dropped into gear and processing, I could have a highly flexible (and much smaller) digital system that would deliver equivalent results in many situations.
Oh, and for the people who’ve mentioned Polaroid, there’s a reason equipment is so cheap now: http://www.polaroid.com/ifilm/en/index.html
Yes, I agree.
I think anyone who gets into film, and particularly LF, is doing it because they enjoy the artistic process, not cost.
The gear is pretty affordable—particularly since many people are selling film gear. But the ongoing cost of developing is only going to get higher and higher.
I’d try taking pictures outside using a good zoom lens with a tripod on a uniformly cloudy day. That will give you the most consistent light without the glare of direct sunlight.
My photography teacher swears by an online photo service, which prints poster size prints relatively cheaply. http://www.mpix.com/. One of my fellow students printed her work (a waterfall) on a poster size (20 x 30?) using Pearl paper and had magnificent results.
Most online services will tell you whether the amount of pixels you have will print well in large format. I shoot in RAW, then convert to JPEG, with my Nikon D50 and have never had any issues printing poster size.
I realize you’re international, so you might need to contact whatever service yo use to see if they’ll ship internationally. Or have them ship to someone in the US who will then ship to you.
But be very careful about sending/sharing your digital files. It’s much harder to protect digital images once you put them out on the internet.
I recommend PictureWindow, a photograph editing program by Digital Light & Color. I have the $49 version and it is quite powerful, for example it’s able to warp the angular distortion away and correct pincushion/barrel distortion, and it has several ways of considering color and grayscale. It was created by a serious hobbiest photographer who already made his millions having created some other software, some business app we’d all recognize I think, and then dove into this for the love of it.
You know what else? What about a flatbed scanner? For paintings that will fit on one, it would deliver way better quality than a camera. And they’re cheap, at least in the common sizes.
At my work, we frequently commission large illustrations executed in various media. Some of the smaller pieces go directly to the scanner, but places with the larger drum scanners or high-end flatbeds are getting harder to find locally. More commonly, I’d send the art out to be photographed on 4x5 film (glass plates went away ages ago) then scanned at very high resolution. In the past few years though, we’ve been sending things out to a guy that has a Better Light scaning back , thus skipping the film step and dramatically reducing the amount of color correction needed.
The lighting is a critical component that is often overlooked. Much of the art I’m working with has canvas and paint texture that must be preserved, so the guy spends quite a bit of time positioning his lights so as to bring out the texture without over-emphasizing it. His lighting rig is pretty expensive and something that I could not replicate even with our pro-quality in-house photo studio.
I’m not at work today and don’t have my contact list, but I know there plenty of places that do this work (at least in the US) on a mail basis. If the quality is really important, I wouldn’t recommend that you do this on your own.
The MP-4 can use any film you want (there are many types of 4x5 film - Polaroid’s was an extreme niche product), or, as mentioned, a LF digital back (breathingly expensive toys, but very nice) such as the Better Light.
The OP should be figuring out:
DIY/Hire
If DIY - how to light the puppies
If hire - who (them the pro call the what/how)
I did some more looking around the island yesterday, and so far the best I can get with printing locally is just a color copy, which simply doesn’t cut it. I also ordered several prints from adorama.com, which is very reasonably priced and has a lot of size options. We’ll see how they look when they get here.
As far as emulsion printing, I simply don’t have the room for it here. Our apartment is small, and pretty much every square inch is accounted for. There is no way I can squeeze that kind of equipment in here. But when we move back to the states, I may play around with that. It sounds fun.
Can I do that in Photoshop? Because I have that on my computer, and I really should work on improving my skills with it. I also have a canon LiDE 70 scanner, and I’ve been playing around with it, but it just doesn’t seem to pick up the colors correctly. So far I’m happier with the results from my photographs, but I may be able to fix them up in photoshop. I’ll have to play with it and have some prints made from both scanned and photographed images to see which ones are going to work better.
This contraption sounds ideal, but it does seem like I would need a really huge one, and I’m not finding any on ebay. I’ll keep looking.
They do seem to have good prices. I’ll also order some prints from them to see how they compare to the adorama ones.
I like your artwork–very interesting. I’ll give this a try.
Thanks for all the tips and suggestions, everyone. This has been very helpful.
Nevermind, I found them. I was searching for “copystand” which is how it’s spelled, I think, but on e-bay they’re all “copy stands”
You say you ordered prints from Adorama? Does this mean your work has been digitized?
As RIAA can attest, once something (read: anything) is transferred to bitstream format, it is just too damned easy for thieves to pilfer - there may be a really great digital watermark product out there, but there is definitely some 16 year-old who can hack it.
I do both computer (well, did - mainframe, can you believe it?!) and photo - I will eventually have my fav’s scanned and distributed to my heirs, but I expect to see them pirated within a couple of years of distribution.
Is space is a problem, forget the MP-4 - those are huge monsters - they make the enlarger (see “D5”) look anemic.
Bright cloudy days can work well, too (sorta)
I guess I’m just going to have to risk the pirating. I’m not sure exactly what I can do about it, to be honest. It doesn’t look like I’m going to be able to get these prints made here, so what are my other options besides developing film myself? It seems like tons of artists have their work on internet sites.
McMarried 
Don’t know exaclty what the market expects of the displayed copies - do they need to be (excuse the expression) photo quality, or will a low res print with a large “copyright - please steal somebody else’s work” block print across it be acceptable?
At least get the digital backed up and off your machine - a dvd or cd on the shelf is a good place, anything connected in any manner to the web is not.
Is there any kind of school with either an art or photo dept? Even if you don’t care to sit through a course to get your hands on the gear, prehaps you could offer your work (in your prescense, of course) as subject matter?
Hint for the rest: if you want cheap, legal software, sign up at the community college - the “academic” versions are usually the full set, just priced to get starving students hooked on the mfg’s product - one course, one semester gets you the ID - this is, of course, for those too slow to have figured out how to get it all free, forever…