How do I buy a poster of this awesome Mount St. Helens eruption photo

June 2, 2020 4:49 PM

There's a famous photograph of Mount St. Helens erupting with a red Ford Pinto and a motorcycle. I really want to buy a poster or print of this photo, but my Googling is not turning up any way to do so.

According to the linked article, the photograph was taken by Richard Lasher.

I've tried Googling for posters of the image, but nothing seems to come up for me. Is there any way I can DIY a print or poster through some sort of print-on-demand service? Maybe even something like Kinko's? If I'm going to be "making" the poster myself I guess I'd rather get something even larger than a standard sized poster if anyone has tips for a good way to get a high-quality large print on a budget.

posted by forkisbetter to Media & Arts (5 answers total)

It seems like all good faith efforts to track down the photographer have been made, and I'd feel fine about making a DIY print. Most any copy shop will be able to do a poster-size inkjet print as big as you could possibly want, and any drugstore/big box that does online photo printing can do large-scale prints on photographic paper. The online options are virtually limitless (like, if you want it on stretched canvas, or a shower curtain, or a duvet cover etc.).

If you have Photoshop or similar, there are lots of approaches to up-sizing images for print. Using noise reduction will give the image a subtle "oil painting" effect, but will blend out grain, pixelation and JPEG cruft.

My own approach, given the vintage of the photo, would be to size it up to the desired print size at 150 dpi (300 is the standard, but in most settings you'll never see the difference, and there are file size caps on many online photo services) and apply a colour halftone (dot pattern) filter, which will camouflage out the digital artifacts. The halftone will be visible up close, but it should have the effect of an enlarged magazine/newspaper photo instead of a crappy JPG.

This is what I mean. (I had to compromise on resolution/quality to upload to imgur, but that file should still give a decent 18x24" print).
posted by wreckingball at 5:32 PM on June 2, 2020 [2 favorites]

You probably know that you can search for matching images on TinEye.com. Unfortunately you can't save or link to searches, but just copy/paste the URL of any of the photos into the search area & you'll find dozens of matching photos.

If you want to use wreckingball's idea (which I was also going to suggest, though with less helpful detail), the largest & best images I could find via TinEye were these:

1
2
3
4
5

It looks like at least some of those are actually higher res scans with more information/less distortion vs just scaled-up versions of files that were originally smaller. Anyway, you can take a look at them and see what you think.

Also the Hemmings.com article about the photo--referenced in the link you provided--has some more details and the article comments are also (perhaps?) worth glancing at.
posted by flug at 8:57 PM on June 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

You could also commission a painting based on the photo!
posted by Ostara at 10:09 PM on June 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

That's a great photo.

I tried to take one of the versions flug linked to, denoise it a bit, and run it through a neural network super-resolution algorithm to get a cleaner, higher-res version for printing. This is the result (see "Download post" on the right to grab the full res 2360x3200 pixel image).

And yes, a copy/print shop or many online services (here's one article with a variety of options) can take an image file like that and print it for you.
posted by whatnotever at 11:30 PM on June 2, 2020 [7 favorites]

Oh, I'm sorry; "download post" doesn't show up in the public view of the image. Here's a direct link to the image file.

[The denoising and scaling is far from perfect, and someone else could probably do a better job, fwiw.]
posted by whatnotever at 9:49 AM on June 3, 2020 [2 favorites]