Gut check
Yesterday I conducted an experiment and I think the results are more than a little illuminating. I decided that I was going to make prints for the purposes of hanging on my walls. The idea was that these were to be the types of prints that I would feel comfortable selling for more than a $100. To that end I loaded up on printer ink, calibrated my monitor, bought the best paper I could find, and set to it.
A few words about paper: when I bought my photo printer in April of last year, I promptly ran though 100 sheets of 8.5×11 Ilford Galerie smooth gloss paper teaching myself how to get adequate prints with a degree of consistency. It’s good paper and I’ve been using it since. As the printer will print up to 13×19, I’ve also messed around with large prints on cheap glossy paper. For this exercise though, I decided to print to “fine art” paper (remember, my criteria is that I’d need to feel comfortable selling the print for >$100). I settled on Royal Renaissance (309 gsm) from MediaStreet. (No, I have no idea what the “gsm” rating is.) This stuff is beautiful… and it should be as it works out to over $3 per 13×19 inch sheet.
Paper and ink loaded, I sat down to pick out images that would be worthy of this rich treatment. And…I had a really hard time with it. Over the past 12 months I’ve taken nearly 8,000 photographs, and yet I had a hard time finding ones that I thought were compelling enough to warrant the “fine art” treatment. That’s pretty eye opening. Of the three I’ve printed so far, two of them were shot in the past month. I’m not exactly sure what it all means, but I think it’s a good thing—an education in the difference between taking a photograph and making an image. Much of what I’ve done up to this point (and by “up to this point” I mean as long as I’ve been pressing a shutter release) has been about taking pictures. I think it’s only recently that I’ve begun to concern myself with making images. Interesting…
Ok, enough navel gazing. Here’s how I proof my prints, and yes, these are the three I did yesterday:
Posted to the strains of: When You Lie from the album “Too Crowded on the Losing End” by Patty Hurst Shifter