Panoramic Photo

The night before UN Day, I had an idea of a great photograph. Why not get all the flag bearers to pose for a photo, and then make a huge panoramic photo, and hang it somewhere in school...what better way to represent an international school? So, I set up my camera on a tri-pod, arranged the 47 kids in a circle around me, and then used string to keep them all equi-distant from my tri-pod. I took 38 vertical RAW photos overlapping a kid in each photo, and then stitched them together in Photoshop for one continuous panoramic photo. When I was done, the file was 1.7 gigabytes in size, and when printed, it would be two feet high and TWENTY feet long. The next step was to find a printer able to print a photo of this size, and then mount it, and hang it. I called my good friend, Deniek, a Balinese photographer who lives in Jakarta. He told me that the EPSON software for his large format printer could only handle files up to a certain pixel dimension, and my photo was way over. SO, we were able to lower the resolution enough to get into the range of the software, and at the same time, keep the photograph at photo quality....the quality came out fantastic, and there is no way you could tell that it was printed at 200 dpi instead of the standard 300 dpi for most photos. The guys came to school yesterday, built a custom frame for the photo, and then the school carpenters hung the photo. It now is displayed proudly in the high school office.