Print Works
For several months I had the idea in my head to create a few fine art prints of my photography, possibly in a small edition or similar. With tens of thousands of photos in my collection, surely there must be the odd one that would look good in print.
A few weeks ago I went to a photography trade show in Dubai and ran into Rick from www.digitalprintmaker.com - located in Al Quoz in Dubai. Great guy and was able to give me some good and genuine advice on the process and paper choices.
I had previously only printed a few books from Apple's Aperture store, as well as some random small standard prints and one canvas print which is now hanging in my apartment, so my experience with true fine art printing was limited.
When I went to his shop we had the chance to go through his collection of paper types. I had the plan to try different types for different images and realized that picking photos you really (!) like is much harder when it is about choosing a print, and not just putting them on Facebook.
The papers he had were of excellent variety, and I settled for German quality from https://www.hahnemuehle.com which makes paper for over 500 years, and picked three different variants:
308 gsm Photo Rag® 100% cotton rag paper
325 gsm Fine Art Baryta Gloss alpha cellulose paper
305 gsm Photo Rag® Ultra Smooth 100% cotton rag paper
For the lion, city and church subjects, respectively. All prints are 35 x 25cm.
I'm very happy with the result of the test print, particularly the non-gloss variants. I'll have to take another look at gloss or satin options next time, as the current paper feels less special than the others. In the end, this is more an emotional aspect than anything scientific, aside from the texture it's difficult to tell the difference in quality.
Now it's time to look at some frames and for these shots and then possibly make a small edition print for sale - I also want to try bigger sizes.