Making a full-size poster of my instrument panel for wall art

Van Johnston

Van Johnston

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Van Johnston
I'd like to make a full-size poster of my instrument panel to hang in my office and maybe give a duplicate to my student pilot son for his dorm wall.

Current plan is take photo on ground from back seat, crop out extraneous views, then take to Fedex Kinkos or similar for printing. My photography skills are limited to point and shoot, and photo editing skills/tools are limited to what I can do in PowerPoint. Grumman AA-5.

Has any one done this? Any suggestions?
 
that will work....however, the print will be grainy if your resolution (format) from your camera isn't all that great.
 
I haven't done it but I agree with checkout......get some quality high res pics. maybe u have a friend with a good camera, take lots and lots of pics so u can take the best one.
 
Most of the current crop of DSLRs will take an excellent photo for this purpose when used at their max resolution. While you can photoshop it to crop out stuff, frankly photoshop is a pig and doing it on huge images is tedious. A better plan is to just try to avoid getting a lot of extranenous stuff in the picture to begin with.
 
Van Johnston said:
I'd like to make a full-size poster of my instrument panel to hang in my office and maybe give a duplicate to my student pilot son for his dorm wall.

Current plan is take photo on ground from back seat, crop out extraneous views, then take to Fedex Kinkos or similar for printing. My photography skills are limited to point and shoot, and photo editing skills/tools are limited to what I can do in PowerPoint. Grumman AA-5.

Has any one done this? Any suggestions?
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I just did this. Snapfish will make a 20x30 print for $21.99. I used a 10MP shot and it came out okay.
 
Get Jack to do it! His exterior shots are beautiful and stunning. Maybe he'll be along to offer his thoughts.
 
Lighting will probably be your main issue. Put the camera on a tripod so it can use a slower shutter speed if necessary, set in in back behind and between the front seats. Camera flash *may* be sufficient, but it may reflect on the instrument glass. I'd add lighting on the front seats, pointed at the panel, so you can see whether there are reflections before snapping the shot.

Watch the exposure if you take the shot outside...the camera may meter on the exterior view, leaving the panel extremely dark. Taking the shot in a hangar or at night would mostly avoid this, but then getting things lighted evenly is more of a hassle.

Agree that posing the shot with a minimal of background out the windows is a good idea, but Photoshopping to leave just the outline of the panel won't be that tough.

Ron Wanttaja
 
Most modern 10-12 megapixel cameras will do just fine. Take the shot from the backseat on a cloudy day for even lighting. I do a lot of photoshop work. Send me the image and the original panel dimensions and I'll size it up for you, then give you a link to a place that will print it life-size pretty cheap. Kinkos will work, too, but may not hit the exact dimensions if that's important.
 
PosterBrain and Staples are my favorites both are pretty cheap and do good work. PosterBrain is better quality but it has to be shipped Staples will have it in 20 min
 
mscard88 said:
Get Jack to do it! His exterior shots are beautiful and stunning. Maybe he'll be along to offer his thoughts.
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Thanks!

I would just use a DSLR on a small tripod with a wide-angle lens. As far as printing it, go to sharpprints.com, upload your photo and they will print a 24x36 for $14.95. I've done two poster-size photos with them now, and they're amazing and it's hard to beat the price!
 
Thanks for all the advice! I will get some help from friends/family with the right equipment.
 
LDJones said:
Most modern 10-12 megapixel cameras will do just fine. Take the shot from the backseat on a cloudy day for even lighting. I do a lot of photoshop work. Send me the image and the original panel dimensions and I'll size it up for you, then give you a link to a place that will print it life-size pretty cheap. Kinkos will work, too, but may not hit the exact dimensions if that's important.
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Wow, thanks for the offer! I may take you up on that. Probably 4-6 weeks away from everything aligning to take the photo. Will be in touch.
 
I'd like to do that as well..

Actually, what I'd really like is to fine the full res version of this flying magazine picture as it is 100% identical (down to the CF panel trim, red stitching, etc...) to my panel.
Pg_2_a.JPG
 
RudyP said:
I'd like to do that as well..

Actually, what I'd really like is to fine the full res version of this flying magazine picture as it is 100% identical (down to the CF panel trim, red stitching, etc...) to my panel.
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You could probably contact Cirrus. They most likely paid the photographer for the rights to the photo and therefore they're the only ones who could authorize reprinting it. They would probably have the full-res photo if they're willing to share it.
 
I'll try that Jack.. Or maybe Flying Magazine would be willing to share the picture. For someone with my middling photography skills, I know I could not do better than this.
 
You could send it to Fathead and I'm sure they would do it too.....
 
I did this a while back for a buddy who runs a flight school and wanted to have a photo of one of his C172’s panel for his website and for student familiarization. A several-image composite ended up working best. Here’s what I did: During the day, I pushed the seats all the way aft, climbed in the back, and took a shot of the lower panel, then a shot of the upper panel. Even though it was daytime, I used a flash with a diffuser to reduce shadows (it still turned out a little dark IMHO so will be using better lights next time). I also draped a white sheet over the front window to get a more diffuse light and make it easier to later mask-out the window area later.

I stitched the two panel shots together in Photoshop and then “cut out” the area where the window is in order to put a more scenic backdrop. For that, I layered in a third shot that I took that night from his ramp looking west toward the mountains. I kept it all at a high enough resolution to print fairly large format.

Reflection off of the instrument glass is a definite problem (see the mag compass in the image below, which I left as-is). To get around this, you can Photoshop in individual photos of the instruments without the reflection, which is what I did for several of these.

Here’s the thumbnail:

verlLpH.jpg
 
I like that. I had wondered about making a composite of two shots also so as to photograph the yokes more head on and reduce their obscuration of the the panel behind them. Will experiment.
 
For those of you who don't have Photoshop, there is a piece of freeware called GIMP (https://www.gimp.org) that is absolutely outstanding for image processing. It has a fairly complex user interface that takes a little while to get used to, but otherwise is every bit as powerful as Photoshop.
 
Unit74 said:
You could send it to Fathead and I'm sure they would do it too.....
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I have a Fathead of *edited name of mod* on my wall. It's amazing how lifelike it is.
 
Flying Viking said:
For those of you who don't have Photoshop, there is a piece of freeware called GIMP (https://www.gimp.org) that is absolutely outstanding for image processing. It has a fairly complex user interface that takes a little while to get used to, but otherwise is every bit as powerful as Photoshop.
Click to expand...

And if you'd like something in between GiMP and Paint, try getpaint.net.. also completely free, fairly feature rich, but still easy to use.
 
My family took one in secret while we where flying the kids back to college. Took it from the back seat and enlarged it as others have said. It is my one of my favorite gifts ever and hangs in a prominent place. Glad that when they took it I had tailwinds and was on altitude so the instruments look ok to a pilot.
 
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