I bought a new digital camera and took it fishing on the Weber River (Utah) near my home saturdayto test it out. The fish co-operated, it was an unbelievable day: 22 Browns, 2 Rainbows and 2 Whitefish. This is twilight zone fishing for this river, "The West's Greatest Whitefish Tailwater". I usually go through a 20/1 Whitefish/Trout ratio. Anyway, as luck would have it, four of these browns had some respectable size, 22", 20", 18". and 17", and I have pictures to prove it!
This brings me to the point of this story.... I have recently been experimenting with an Epson printer and was amazed at how well it printed a 72 DPI images. This gave me the idea to blow up my "tropies" to life-size , using the fly rod I included in each picture for scale. It worked great, I now have pictures of these fish hanging on the wall next to my tying bench, and they are beautiful to behold. All in all it was kind of magical day, catching the fish, taking their pictures, then mounting their life-sized image on my wall, all in the same day thanks to digital photography. Here are the specs: Conditions: Cloud/Sunshine. The river was mostly covered with ice a week ago, it was now completely open and slightly off color. Hatches: Large, size 20 midges galore. Fly: 18 BHGRHE with 20 BHPT dropper. Fish were caught on both, the 20 BHPt had the edge. Method: Hi-stick nymphing alongthe edges of deep (4-5 feet) runs/pools. Picture resolution: 2.4 Mega-pixels (1800 by 1600) sized in Photoshop to make life-sized prints. At first I tried interpolating the 72 DPI images to 150 DPI to achieve photo quality resolution, but discovered the printer's built in interpolation makes identical prints while keeping the file size to a much smaller 72 DPI. Camera: Fuji Fine-pix 4800 Zoom Printer: Epson 5500 (Commercial grade 2800 DPI six color photo printer) My printer at home, an Epson C-80 printed pictures of identical quality. I supect most current generation printers will do an excellent job. Ink/Paper: Epson archival matte paper, archival ink, rated fade resistant for 200 years. I taped two sheets together for 22" x 8.5 Tom Davenport (Now back to lurking)
