Last week I was contacted by a representative of a cosmetics firm in the UK about using an old image of some dry grasses that I had shot several years ago. It appears that she had found this image on one of my sites and recognized that a narrow vertical crop of a portion of the shot would work for a poster they were designing.

Their plan was for the image to fill the left edge of a poster that would be 1.5 meters high. Graphically, it made a lot of sense – the mock-up they sent to me looked quite nice. However, there was a problem.

The original photo was made on one of my first digital cameras. Unfortunately, not only was it limited to 4 megapixel resolution but it stored images in .jpeg format rather than RAW. The .jpeg format does not retain all original image information and it introduces (in most cases) compression distortions which, while not an issue for viewing small on-screen images, are quite ugly when enlarged.

Suspecting that the image quality would not be sufficient for what they had in mind but hoping that use on a poster might not require an absolutely sharp image, I sent them a full size copy to consider.

They were disappointed. I was disappointed. There was no way it was going to work.

To be honest, obtaining an extremely sharp image that will be cropped and then enlarged to 1.5 meters high would take fairly special gear. Medium format might work; a view camera would be better.

It so happened that last weekend I was back at the same place where I took the original 4 megapixel image a few years back. This time I set up the tripod and took a few similar images in RAW mode on my 8 megapixel camera. A few sample crops are shown at right.

Image information: Three Grass Photos. August 28, 2005. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell.
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