Stitching Photos Together• What to do when your client wants a photo 16 feet wide.

Earlier this week I was contact by one of my higher education photography clients, St. Norbert College, in De Pere, Wisconsin, to create a shot for them of their campus just after sunrise from across the Fox River.  They had a shot from about 10 years ago that they liked and wanted to use, but it wasn’t of high enough quality to meet the demands of how this photo will be displayed.  The main purpose of this shot is to a 16 foot wide by 5 foot tall image behind the front desk at their new Welcome Center.  I have some large file cameras, but this shot was going to require something in the range of 370 megabytes for output.  I was able to get a shot that large by actually taking five photos of this scene and stitching them together in Photoshop CS5.  The client also wanted to show some activity of the crew team in the shot.  The crew boats in this shot are actually from two other photos with the same lens, same location and same lighting which made it very easy to drop them in.

I was very happy with how the shot turned out and so was the client.  We couldn’t have asked for a better morning for the photo shoot.  The final installation should be up in a few week and I hope to post a shot of it then.

Thanks for looking!

Mike