I just wanted to start putting the word out now, that about a year from now it is extremely likely that there will be need for high-resolution photos for a North American ink-on-paper periodical publication to do with our subject matter. At this point, I can't be more specific than that; but this is a very good time for us to start accumulating usable images, in order to have an adequate supply of good content on hand when the time comes that it'll be needed on a regular basis. Print on paper has much higher image size and resolution requirements than web pages do. I would advise every serious builder documenting their projects, people who'll be covering events, and those shooting "gallery" photos of their bikes to start working in print-image resolution now. A hi-rez image big enough for print use is easily brought down to web size afterward, so there's no need to shoot both ways. Those who contributed photos to last year's BR&K Calendar may recall that the image format requirement for that project was 9" X 12" (23 X 31 CM) in size @ 300 pixels per inch (PPI). It requires about an 8 megapixel digital camera to produce an image of this size and resolution, or film from a good 35MM camera scanned to those specs. Those specs are pretty much identical to a typical print magazine's full-page or cover format. A 2-page center-spread image is approximately 18 X 12" at the same resolution. When I had the action photos of my "Heat" chopper shot recently, I had the possibility of printed poster use in mind, so my photographer shot the scene with a 6 X 7 CM professional medium-format camera, so the image could be blown up as large as 2 X 3 feet @ 300 PPI for good poster image quality. For use in BR&K, I just sized the image down in Photoshop and lowered the PPI to a third of normal print resolution. It took about 15 seconds. When we were doing the BR&K Calendar, it was more practical for those who had multiple photos to burn them onto a CD disc and snail-mail it to me. A 9 X 12" image at 300 PPI has a file size of 27.8 megabytes. That file size usually allows only one image to be E-mailed at a time, if that. Many people's E-mail services won't handle even one attached file of that size. Maybe by the time lots of images are needed on a regular basis, we'll have an FTP deal going, so images of that size can be uploaded and downloaded to and from the FTP site, without going through E-mail; but for now, snail-mailed CDs is the way to go. Most people doing casual snapshot shooting set their digital cameras on the resolution setting giving them the most images on the camera's memory media (640 X 480 pixels @ 72 PPI). While this is fine for most websites' usage, it's way too lo-rez to be useful for print, and can't be blown up from the original size. Presuming that the camera is capable of taking hi-rez images in the first place, it should always be set on the highest-resolution setting, for any images intended for print. Fortunately, many people already have a decent 35MM film camera gathering dust in the closet. Maybe they should dust it off? A few years ago, before I had a digital camera, I'd just take a roll of color negative film from our 35MM Nikon to the nearest drug store. They'd process the film in an automatic machine, run the strip through a scanner and, an hour later, hand me a CD disc with the whole roll of film on it, for a very cheap price, especially if I didn't want a set of paper prints. The images on the CD were about 5 X 8" at 254 PPI, and of reasonable quality. I couldn't fill a magazine cover with that image size, but if I'd been documenting the building of a bike or covering an event for a print magazine, it would certainly have been sufficient for the purpose, since there are usually multiple smaller photos on that sort of printed page. Any digital service bureau can scan your 35 MM negatives at full-page size at 300 PPI for a reasonable price, though not as cheaply, naturally, as the drugstore will do it. The most economical way of working it is to use the cheaper drugstore scanned disc, which comes with a little "contact sheet", as a way of selecting the very best few shots for higher-rez scans. I would have done a whole new BR&K Calendar for 2007, if I'd had enough hi-rez photos on hand to put one together, but I didn't. Aside from future BR&K print projects in the offing, having photo files in print-suitable size and resolution can be very useful, if you're interested in hanging prints of your bikes on your wall at home or at a show; or if your local newspaper wants to do an article on you and your "hobby", you'd be good to go, eh? So, it's already in everybody's interest to go hi-rez for their kustombike photography from now on. PS: The photo quality requirements of printed magazines are no different than those for Web-based magazines. We recommend that people who haven't done so lately, re-familiarize themselves with the information in our article on the subject: Photographing Your Bicycle |
Photo Requirements For Printed Magazines, etc. |
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