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If you are anything like me you have hundreds or thousands of prints and no where to put them. Sure you can get a few images framed - but at $200 a pop, that eats into one's equipment budget. You can pin images to the wall - when allowed, give them to friends, swap, get published, sell images, but realistically that probably still leaves you with a huge number of images and maybe no idea what to do with them.
This is where I'm at right now. Here's some thoughts about how I am going to go about fixing this problem.
I'm going to create a series of portfolios. Some will be closed editions - 'best images of 2004', others will remain open indefinitely - 'Industrial Abstracts' - images will be added to these and possibly some will leave as better images come along which leave older images looking a bit anaemic. I'm going to create some that by definition will have images leave - '10 best black and white ever'.
I'm going to break down and fork out the money for portfolio boxes, probably from Light Impressions Direct. At present I have dozens of unlabelled paper boxes of various manufacturers stacked up with varied quality images.
I hope to settle on a single type of paper so there is consistency, though I might have to have semi gloss and matte. I think I'll use 8.5X11 paper, even though for a long time 13x19 has been my standard size paper. With working with the f type semi gloss papers on the 5000, I have come to appreciate a heavy weight paper of fairly small size that is easy to hold in one's hands and doesn't require standing back to view. I'll print them with at least a 1 inch border around and generally more. I haven't settled on a paper yet. I feel that Moab Entrada is a bit textured for such small prints, Epson Enhanced Matte a very nice surface but a bit light weight and possibly subject to some yellowing since not behind glass. I have some of the new glossier ultrasmoothe paper from Innova coming that Michael Reichmann recommended - I'll let you know how that works out. I hope Innova fixes their confusing paper labelling - sort of a gloss, glossier, glossiest, only not so obvious which is which.
With such small prints I suspect it will be important that the dot gain (spread of ink on paper) be minimal - some recent 8.5X11 prints on Hahnemuhle Pearl look to be good that way as was Enhanced Matte - not so sure about the Moab. Also, I'm convinced that prints on the 5000 look sharper than from my Epson 4000 I wonder if dot gain is the issue.
As things stand right now, were I to 'pop my clogs' as the English have been known to say (die that is), my family would find a jumble of work prints, reject prints and good prints, none signed, no indications of which are keepers, etc. so I think this will be a good idea.
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3 comments:
I have been agonising about these issues too. How will you present your prints? Will you mount them, or use archival sleeves?
An interesting dilemma for sure. What I've been thinking about doing (were it not for the fact that I have hardly any prints - yet) is the making of a few hand-made books. These would feature wooden or other interesting covers, hand-made paper or good watercolour paper pages, and the prints attached to the pages somehow, probably those little stick-on corners like old photo-albums had, or maybe archival glue of some sort. With good quality B&W prints or pigment inkjet prints, such a book could preserve a fine collection of, say, fifty unique prints, for possibly hundreds of years.
Here's an article from Luminous Landscape describing what is easier if not as inexpensive method - also I find that photocorners look ugly and catch paper as you turn pages and they double the bulk of the accumulated pages so I think I'm going to try the professional binding method. OF course you can buy premade books with loose pages but they cost about the same as binding and the pages can't be machine loaded into your printer and the paper is substantially thicker and you don't get as many pages in your book as you would with enhanced matte. Still, they are better quality paper. I think I'll go with the enhanced matte.
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