Lenswork News

Big news from Lenswork with the return of their special editions. You may remember that in the past Lenswork made selected images available inexpensively - they took original photographic prints and scanned them, made digital negatives from them and then contact printed onto silver paper to produce high quality silver prints which were a close match for the original print. Over time the materials and expertise to make the digital negatives disappeared and so we haven't had Special Editions for a few years.

Brooks Jensen has brought back the idea only better and cheaper. Now what Lenswork is offering is a folio of images, anything from 5 - 20, inkjet Epson K3 on Harman FBAL glossy (mostly) paper enclosed in one of his lovely folio cases he has developed for his own work.

The absolutely amazing thing is that he's selling the folios for anything from $95, that for a 10 print folio - that's $9.50 a print! Keep in mind that if the photographer shoots digitally (or if he even prints digitally) these are as original as the prints he or she normally sells, presumably for a whole lot more.

Photographers might not include their most famous images for use in folios but to get a chance to own, admire, learn from and compare top quality images from great photographers is a wonderful opportunity.

Even impoverished students can afford images - several could get together and share images if they are really broke but lets face it, $95 is the cost of a single concert these days.

Frankly at this price, even if the folio only included one image that you particularly liked it would be worth it, and besides, the other images in the folio have been selected for their quality and perhaps it would be a good idea to study them to see why others think they are good - you might learn to like them, you will almost certainly learn from looking at them.

And guess what, Lenswork are even doing colour images - of course there's no reason not to but it will be interersting to see what this means for Lenswork accepting colour portfolios. Don't forget that Lenswork Extended already accepts colour work.