Buying Panoramic Pictures

I offer most of these panoramas for sale at a price of $10 per square foot, plus shippng. There is a minimum order of $25, though I will do smaller images with total under 3 square feet for $30.

(New: Archival prints good for 150+ years for $15/square foot, archival canvas prints for $24/square foot. Standard dyes should still last decades out of the sun.)

These panoramas look vastly better printed at full resolution than what you see on the web. For any picture, be sure to try the "slice at full resolution" link to get an idea of what you will see in your printed copy.

Panoramas can be printed in just about any size, up to about 40 feet long, though most will be of limited close-up sharpness at that size.

Every panorama has a fixed aspect ratio, based on the pixel and example inches dimensions listed under it. For example, a picture that is 12000 pixels by 3000 pixels has an aspect ratio of 4 to 1, which means if it is 1 foot high, it will be 4' wide. For the extra detailed long panoramas, this means if you want them to be not very long (such as 6') they may be only 6" high. It is not recommended you go below 6" high in most cases.

If you really need to change the aspect ratio, I can crop the image, presumably on the left or the right. Tell me what portion of the image you want to lose to fit your needs. Probably best to take a few inches more than you need and then hand cut yourself to get the exact crop you want.

When a picture is printed it will be at a given DPI. pictures at 200DPI and higher will look very sharp even up close. Pictures at 150DPI will look decently sharp, even from just a few inches away. Pictures under 100DPI will appear unsharp up close but will still look excellent when viewed from a typical viewing distance.

(To be exact, the human eye resolves 1 minute of arc, which means you will be quite happy with 140 ppi viewed from a distance of 2', that's generally more than enough. At a distance of 6' under 50 ppi will look fine.)

Printing a picture so small as to make it more than 300 DPI is wasting resolution. The printer and your eye are not good enough to make the most of this resolution.

Prints are available on matte, satin and glossy papers. Glossy has a bit more contrast, but may have annoying reflections.

Prints less than 6' wide can be trimmed exactly with no margins if desired. (Normally I leave a 1/4" margin for framing or mounting.) Prints above 6' wide wll be trimmed with wider margins and the cut may not be perfectly straight as it must be done by hand. Exact cut is not available.

Shipping is typically $6-7 in the USA for smaller prints, and can be larger on particularly large prints.

Framing

It can be difficult and expensive to frame large panoramas. It is difficult to get matte boards for panoramas wider than 56" or so, indeed at many shops, the widest boards are 40". Larger panoramas must be mounted unmatted, or with two half-mattes that are joined.

Frames in general are normally not much longer than 96" though wood mouldings for custom work can be found up to 16' long.

A good and inexpensive framing can be done by placing a picture between two sheets of plexiglass which are bound with clips or plexi-bolts. Again these are limited to 96" in most cases.

Outside USA

Alas, my printers don't ship outside the USA. I can have them ship to me and I will re-ship them for an extra fee. You can also give me the address of a friend in the USA. This adds a fair bit of delay. You may be able to find a printing house near your own location which allows me to upload the files to them for printing and local pickup by you. I'll work out a price to you based on the printing cost their and a margin for me. This will save you the cost and time of the double shipping, though the local print house will probably be more expensive. Their quality is for you to evaluate. For smaller prints, photo printing services may also be suitable. Call the company and ask if they can print photo quality inkjet, lightjet or similar at the size you need from an uploaded file, and how much they charge.

Cost to you will be about $70 per square meter, plus whatever the printing house charges (vs. the $107 per square meter I charge for printing it for you.)

Typically I don't provide the full-res files to random folks, sorry.

Calculating your size and price

Go back to the picture you want and note the dimensions, in pixels for the full panorama. For example it will say "The full panorama is 15023 x 2890" and will give a suggested size and DPI value. You work out how large you want the image, either as a width or height. Say you decide you want the picture 6 feet (72 inches) long. Multiply 72 times pixel-height divided by pixel-width. Here, we have 72 * 2890 / 15023 or 13.85 inches. Next multiply the two dimensions to get square inches and divide by 144 to get square feet: 72 * 13.85 / 144 is 6.925 square feet, so the picture will be $69.25 to print, plus shipping and tube, which is usually about $7 by priority mail.

You may want to work out your DPI (more properly, PPI) based on the rules laid out above.

Contact Me

Send E-mail to btm at templetons.com to arrange purchase of a panorama or other still photos. You can also contact me for other commercial uses (billboards, magazines, web sites.) You may use the web resolution images for multi-monitor screen wallpaper free of charge.

You may NOT inline images from my web server without permission. If you do so and I notice the bandwidth, you may suddenly find the image replaced one day with something ruder. If you want to use an image on your web site, contact me.