When I was doing a little research for my Dune Dragons series years ago during the last solar eclipse, I become more interested in Chinese Astrological symbolism – but it sort of fell away. The 12-year repeating animal cycle has some interesting history, but when you don’t have photographs of half of the animals, it’s hard to turn it into any type of photo project. But I saw a news story yesterday that reminded me of the Lunar New Year and it indicated this is the Year of the Tiger.

Now, I don’t have many tiger photographs. In fact, they are all from a single day at the Detroit Zoo, 19 years ago! I don’t visit there that often. However, a particular tiger image came to mind for me because it was one of the first enlargements I ever made from my very first DSLR, a Nikon D2H. Anyone that recalls those days remembers all the talk of megapixels. How many do you need, blah blah blah. I had a lot of other photographers tell me good luck getting anything larger than a 5×7 print from it. I began to question if I wasted money on this thing.

But I read contrary experiences from others actually using the camera. So I sent a meager 4 MP JPEG file of one of my new DSLR tiger photos off to a lab that enlarged it using Genuine Fractals to make a 24×36 inch print. It came back really quite good. Every whisker, every eyelash was clear with no jagged edges. So I wrote an article about it because I was tired of reading so much about how digital wasn’t ready, from a lot of self-proclaimed “experts.” It drew some traffic for awhile from various photo groups, surpisingly getting an occasional visit from one of those links today.

That article I mentioned on the Lunar New Year mentioned how the year is symbolic of taking risks. So all this came back to me, and coincidentally, with a tiger. I went searching my archives for that photograph again to see if I wanted to redevelop anything about it. I did some updates to the calibration profile in Lightroom, applied a preset that bumped the contrast a little, and that was about it. Of course now, with 19 years of megapixel wars behind us (because ugh! who wants a 4 MP image anymore 🙂 ), I thought I’d run it through a basic uprez in Gigapixel AI that made it into a 16MP image. It did an excellent job as usual.

Then I thought – hey – why not add a Chinese chop stamp in the spirit of this particular year? Might make for a nice gift or card for someone inspired by the Year of the Tiger. And so I did, with the Chinese character for a tiger.