Cole gets a Cannes Lion
A photo by Cole Rise, who is one of my favorite people and simply a great photographer has been picked as Cannes Lion award (Gold campaign) winner in the Billboard/Street Posters category. His photo of a friend standing in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado was part of Apple’s Shot on iPhone 6 campaign. Congratulations amigo — and thanks for all your great picture. By the way, Cole’s app, Lite.ly finds a nice home on the home screen of my iPhone 6.
It was only last week I pinged Cole and asked him about how they were printing such gigantic posters on the side of the buildings and on billboards considering that my iPhone 6+ photos show their imperfection on the iMac 5K. He pointed out that the trick has to do with DPI (dots or pixels per inch if you’re talking screens). A photo straight from the phone is about 8 megapixels at 72DPI. However, since billboards are so large and so far away, they can use a really low DPI, like 12-15 dots per inch, which is common when printing at that scale. “The photo looks great huge,” he explained to me in an email.
On an average sized 4K screen, however, will operate at around 130-140DPI, nearly double an iPhone photo. The pixels will be stretched and the photo looks like crap, in the same way a low-res photo or icon looks when it’s scaled up on a retina display. “Interestingly though, if your 4K screen is around 60” or larger, the DPI drops below 72 DPI, so the phone photos will start to look amazing,” he added.
If you have not read my interview with Cole over on Pi.co, our yourself a glass of wine (or a cuppa tea) and sit down savor the man’s nuanced take on photography and life.
