First Framed Prints!

9 December, 2007 by bdimitrov

I’ve been writing in this blog about wanting to shift my focus away from photographic technology (camera specs and lens tests) and towards producing exciting images. Well, after about 8 years of playing around and another 2 years of being serious about photography, I reached an important milestone today — I framed two of my prints!

It might not sound like much to you, but to me it’s a big deal. Of course I could have bought a frame and put a picture in it much earlier, but I guess I was waiting for several things to came together. In the last 3 months I looked through all my images, deleted quite a few of them and rated and added metadata to the remaining ones. I calibrated and profiled my monitor and learned about color management. I slowly got the hang of image editing and sharpening, and I produced some decent images on screen. Then, instead of upgrading my camera, I bought a photo printer and started learning about printing. And lately I’ve also been shooting more concentrated than ever before.

But back to the prints. My first attempts on 10 x 15 cm and 13 x 18 cm paper looked good, so naturally I started thinking of framing the best ones. Although I can print as large as A2 (40 x 50 cm), my camera does not have enough pixels for that size and I my wall space is also limited. So I compromised on 30 x 40 cm prints in 50 x 60 cm frames. I wanted frames that can handle frequent print changes and that look good with black-and-white or color images, so after searching a bit, I settled on Nielsen C2 frosted grey aluminum frames and white passepartouts.

A 30 x 40 cm print fits nicely on A3+ paper (13″ x 19″), but before making the jump to that size, I experimented some with 15 x 20 cm prints on A4 paper (8.5″ x 11″). This makes for a thick white border, and I guess I’ll be building up my portfolios in this size and whenever I like something enough for putting it on the wall, I’ll go for the larger size.

My first two framed prints

PS: Of course I would have liked to start with three prints instead of two, but I don’t have three images with a similar topic, color scheme and quality, and damn that perfectionism — I didn’t want to wait any longer…