As anyone who has spent any time in Photography will tell you, you never know what will come up as you’re going through your career. A year ago at the last Reno Air Races, Dad and I started talking about doing a print booth at this year’s event. Having never done one before many challenges arose that we had no good answer too except to say, “let’s try and see what happens.” Well one of those challenges was making outdoor marketing tools, i.e banners. Something simple but catchy and still fun to draw people in. Well the content was easy, planes, and the text was easy, something catchy about the each plane. After talking a bit with my brother we came up with this idea of spotlighting certain planes and making them sound like attractions to come see. He did a great job as you can see. The next step was actually getting the banners made.
I was in charge of the actual making part, which wasn’t real hard because with the internet these days, it is real easy to find a place that makes banners. I went with FedEx Kinkos because they had a shop in town for a reasonable price. The next step was doing the necessary changes for printing on large scale vinyl. Having been used to printing on paper for a while now I knew some steps to the process, but on a new media type I wasn’t quite sure what was going to happen. Now if you’ve looked on my site you can see that I’m comfortable up to 24×30 prints, but these ones the smallest was 36×60 and the largest was 36×120. Needless to say they ended up being large files, which turned out to be the hardest part to deal with. Whenever you go bigger you have to sharpen, brighten, bring up blacks and saturation just to make it look right. With vinyl the image also has to be sRGB which i didn’t know because I couldn’t find a vinyl proof filter in Photoshop. The next truly challenging part was making the image into a PDF. Now apparently this is common in the press world especially with books, converting everything into a PDF from publication. Well with the size adjustment two of the files were 550mb while the 36×120 banner was 1.09GB! Try turning that into a PDF, can’t happen, Photoshop don’t like it. Now you’re probably thinking, well just bring the resolution down. Well when you’re making something that big you want as much information as you can get! But that’s what I had to do and it worked. All three got sized down with the PDF for upload to their servers and the job was done in no time. Now I’m still very curious how long these will last outdoors since that is what the are made for. I can honestly say that it was a bit of anxiety on the first one but a lot of excitement when they were all done!