How BIG Can You PRINT Your Photos? (iPhone vs APS-C vs Medium Format)

Hello, today we are talking about the Great Prince. This was made about 10 years ago with a small crop-focused DSLR camera I took on my honeymoon, but how many megapixels do you need to make large

print

s? What type of camera can you make large

print

s with? In today's video we're going to discuss it all, look at examples, and hopefully it will inspire you, so come with me. That image needs some love and attention. I haven't treated her very well over the years. which I'll explain in a minute, but before we continue today, this video is sponsored by Squarespace.

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next move with Squarespace. Oh, it's a sweaty job moving those large prints, but one of the questions I get asked often is: what size can you make

your

prints? Do you need any type of special camera? How many megapixels do you need? What resolution? All that kind of stuff and when you go online on YouTube what you'll often find is people say you can blow up any image to the size you want and it'll look good, now there's some truth to that but I think there's a couple of things we need to keep in mind because printing at this size gets expensive and I don't want you to waste your money printing something that doesn't turn out very good, so the main thing we want to think about is what the viewing distance of the image you are creating and how many fine details.

Do you want me to appear in it? Because if you zoom in on an iPhone shot that big, the fine details just won't be there; however, this image here is a good example of where viewing distance will let you get away with it now that it's taken. on the canon 550d if i remember correctly it had an 18 megapixel camera and for a while it took pride of place in my living room and looked great but when you got a little closer because it was so zoomed in you started to lose. a bit of fine detail but just looking at it a meter or two back you couldn't tell and it always looked great, then we moved and it got damaged in the move and then I put it in the garage and I'm embarrassed. to say I neglected it for a while, now I brought it into the studio and I'm going to use some glue to stick it back to that board it's mounted on and then I'm going to put it up. up high where you can't get close to it and as you can see it's actually pretty damaged, but that viewing distance from down on the ground to where I'm going to place it we'll forgive all that so it still looks great up high on the wall if you want that fine detail, that's where we need larger megapixel cameras and it gets a little bit more expensive in terms of how we're actually producing the image, but we can still do it, we can still enlarge the images. it just means that the fine details are lost, so it's about what you need, what your requirements are, but today I hope to receive something very special or what I hope is very special.

We'll also look at a photo from a phone and just to see how it holds up so we can compare something taken with a phone on a DSLR and then we'll look at the

medium

format

as well, hopefully if it delivers, so yeah, I'm going to start . putting it on the wall so there we go and I actually think I'm very happy with it as you can see it's up there now and you saw how damaged and destroyed that print was and you can look back at the At this moment I still see some of those creases that I couldn't remove when I was gluing it back together.

It's really good to have it back on display, but it's a really good example. I think about where the viewing distance of the image is or the work you are going to show is not good up close, you can get away with a long viewing distance, it is a very important part, but I like to see my images from close, I like to go in there and see the fine details. but we'll talk more about that in a bit. What also interests me is what can be done with a phone camera. Can you make decent sized prints with a phone camera?

So, the telephone has become one of the most effective tools. for photographers today, whatever level you're at, I mean, I probably take more pictures of this than anything else these days because I only do landscape photography now, so I take pictures of my children in this, I explore landscapes with this. They take good pictures, but regardless, we are the phone, you still are or they are still essentially fighting physics because only a limited amount of light can get into these tiny lenses and the sensor is also small, so I want to now make a print, it's going to be the biggest print I've ever made on the phone and I'm going to make it like an a2 when if you're thinking about printing an image from your phone, it really needs to be really well lit. and if you're in a landscape on a nice sunny day, that'll be fine and that's what I have here from this moment at the tail end of a Light and Land Lake District tour that I did, it's an amazing moment and I was I was too busy teaching so I couldn't get my proper camera on my DSLR so I took a quick photo with the phone.

I edited it a little and I think it looks great, it's one of the best rainbows I've ever seen. I've already seen it, so I thought it was a very good image to print because it's the best setting you can expect on a phone, so let's send it to the printer with a2. I'll also put a little border on it and I'll see how it looks and what the results are at that time, so here it is and I'm really, really happy that it worked out really well. Just looking at it from about a meter away it looks cool, there's a bit of Triple Rainbow going on too if you can see which I don't know but yeah I mean even from sort of at arm's length it looks pretty cool but there's some limitations.

This is a2, I think A2 is a lovely sized image. you would put it on your wall and it would be pretty big on most people's wall, but there are a couple of problems as you get closer and like I said, I like to get closer to my work, it gets a little mushy, you lose that image. quality as you get closer also where is that double and triple rainbow because it is a very dim light, it is not captured very well and it is a little soft, the colors become a little soft in that sky and that is why, I think . and ultimately there are two things, two points to make, I think if it were, if it were just for me, and that is that I am absolutely excited about it and this should really be an indication that you should go ahead and start print your

photos

because I would rather have that print from an iPhone than have a really good DSLR where I only see images on a screen, which is absolutely obvious, so I call and print way above the DSLR and the screen, so I think that's the first point.

That is the most important point. Secondly, to me that is not good enough to sell as a professional or as someone who only sells prints. I don't think it's good enough. I wouldn't feel comfortable charging hundreds of pounds or even less than 100. For that image I just don't think the image quality is there, but as a job I did for myself from a moment that was really quite special, I'm very happy to so I took out my phone and captured this and Now I'm also really glad I printed it and I think it's a really good example of what a phone print can look like in a2 size and actually if I wanted to enlarge it even further I could as long as kept that viewing distance, it would still work absolutely perfectly if all you have is a phone, you should definitely, if the light is good, try to print some because it still looks good, there are many non-photographers who would never know that. that that was taken with a phone if you didn't tell them and I think that really says something yeah I think it's here it comes in right before I unpack the print as you know this video is sponsored by Squarespace now Squarespace is the perfect place .

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There is 24/7 customer support, so yes, I think you should try it if you are considering creating a website. Visit squarespace.com to start your free trial today and then if you like what you've created, use the offer code first to get 10 off your first purchase. I'm excited, let's take this print out of the box so the story of this photograph begins. A few weeks ago when I asked Fujifilm if I could borrow the Fujifilm gfx 100x, which is a

medium

format

camera that I featured in some previous videos, but I went out with my friend to shoot and, as you know, I messed up the audio.

In that video, I would have shown you the moment when I made this image. I hope you're seeing some of the images here and it's a really special place for me. It's very close to where I grew up. I filmed it several times before photographing that place with my best friend standing next to me, it was a very lovely moment and since I had that camera with that big megapixel sensor, I wanted to make this impression. Now a lot of people will say that photographs are designed to be seen from a distance and to be honest, mine aren't every time I find myself in an art gallery or something.

I go through this process where I look at an image from way back and then I zoom in to see the fine details, like with a painting so you can see the brush strokes and then I step back and almost have a new appreciation for the work. knowing that all those fine details are there and I love that too with my landscape photography and that's what I want from my large print, I want you to be able to get up close and experience that and I hope that's what this image has done. I'll take it out of the box, show you what I came up with and then we can talk a little bit about the technical aspects of printing because I think it's a particularly interesting way to make your prints and also let you know where I got it right, let's get into this box, that's why I love the landscape.

Photography starts with getting into nature, enjoying the outdoors, the mental and physical boost it gives you and then it goes on to create a final print, a final piece of art, it's very satisfying and when you make it that big, that kind of sends satisfaction at another level. I'm absolutely thrilled with this and love the fine details that medium format camera has allowed me to capture. I can also appreciate it by looking back and then getting closer and seeing all those details. the people on the top of the hill, some of the buildings in the background, it's all there, so I love it, I'm very happy with it, but let's talk about the print for a minute because I used a slightly different technique, so with The Photography used to be film and it was an analog process until the final print, but even people are shooting film now, there's usually some kind of digitization at some point and obviously the medium format digital camera I was using is digital to begin with. but then this C type print that I made in the print space tops off the whole process with a genuine photographic process, so this is the Fuji matte paper and it is a

photos

ensitive paper where the image is exposed on the paper and then goes into a machine but it goes through the chemicals and then the final product, the final image comes out at the end.

A photographic process like that is used. Type C printing adds some value over using inkjet. I think for me it possibly does and I believe. It gives me the same feeling I used to get when I shot film and I'm not very romantic about that kind of thing, but I really love this and that Fuji matte paper gives me exactly the right amount of shine that I like, it's nice. From a semi-gloss, it's not rag paper, but it is the Fuji mat and it just has a slight sheen to it which I think looks absolutely beautiful.

I'm very happy with it, but the truth is that you can make big prints like this. From any megapixel level or camera, it's just a matter of taking into account the viewing distance and the fine details you want, if you don't care about fine details when you get up close then you can do pretty much anything, even with a phone. camera, but all I would say is use the best image you can use to get the best image quality you can with the equipment you have because that will result in a better image once you scale it up and it's expensive.

It's not cheap at all, it cost me around £300 in the end, once you assemble it too, ship it and expand it to this size it gets expensive, so you can imagine the market if you sell this sort of thing. the marking above that you will have to do to sell it so keep that in mind and that is why I don't thinkYou might want to do it with nothing but your best images and maybe one that you've already printed at a smaller size, but I really urge you to try it because the more time goes by, the more I think when it comes to your prints. bigger pictures are better, so I hope you enjoyed this look at today's Grand Prince and I just encourage you to go out and try it for yourself, even if you start small, but also try those type C prints.

I think You will be very happy anyway. I'll see you again very, very soon. I'm Adam, this is the first photo of a man out there.