A month or two ago I mentioned that I’ve played around with panoramas for several years but haven’t spent a lot of time with them. The few that I’ve made before were printed by Mpix.com. Although they don’t really offer any print sizes that I would call panoramic (they do have 5 x 15 and 5 x 30), there is a way around this. I first created a 20 x 30 @ 300 ppi image in Photoshop that contained two 8 x 30 photographs (or an 8 x 30 and a 10 x 30). On the white strip between the two photographs I wrote “Please Trim.” An example is shown below. When this image was submitted online with an order for one 20 x 30 print, Mpix sent me two nicely trimmed 8 x 30 pano prints.
Last year I purchased an Epson Stylus Photo R2000 printer and wanted to try using it to print my own panoramas. I didn’t want to start by purchasing a large roll of paper so I looked around for longer sheet paper. Red River Paper sells a number of different paper types in 13 x 38 sheets. (They also sell 8.5 x 25 sheets.) I ordered a box (15 sheets) of 60 lb Polar Matte and 68 lb UltraPro Satin.
When my order arrived, it dawned on me that it’s a little more challenging handling these long sheets of paper than the normal 11 x 17 that I had been using. The printer couldn’t support a sheet this long. At first I thought I would stand and hold the paper but I decided that a little improvisation might help. As shown in the photos below, I propped a board behind the printer and used the cover to one of the paper boxes to extend the paper feed tray. Then I used a stool and the cover to the other box of paper to extend the output tray. Worked like a charm!
There are a lot of entries on the internet about ideal aspect ratios for panoramic prints. The first one that I printed was 12 x 36. That was, of course, in part because of the 13 x 38 paper size. Also, I thought that a 1:3 aspect ratio would be good because it would be like two 35mm images side-by-side. If it turns out that I don’t use all of this paper for printing my own panoramas, I can always cut it in half to generate standard 13 x 19 paper.