Why Make Prints?
I humbly suggest that print is not dead.
I speak from experience both as a producer of images (dance photographer, one-time portrait photographer, Bar/Bat Mitzvah Photographer, and Sports Photographer) and consumer of images (in all of these same areas). I have tens of thousands of images of my family’s life. I even have those images winnowed down to about 1000 images I really love that sample our lives over the years; but in the end, no one generally looks at them. They even live in an online gallery, so we can look whenever we want to. Not much (any) traffic there. What does get regular traffic are the real physical albums and books. Either digital or homemade scrapbook pages, press-printed books, and albums from milestone events are all perused regularly. Wall hangings of single images or collages are regularly interacted with and elicit memories. The print enables the viewer to view them on their own terms and at their own pace. Print is constant; the image is exactly how it is meant to be seen. The print simply is. It is always there, waiting for us, waiting to remind us.
We hired someone to be the photographer at our daughter’s Bat Mitzvah. We got a disk of nicely processed images. They sat for months and months, and then over a year. No one looked at them past the initial oohs and aahs. Then, as the two-year anniversary neared, I turned our favorites into a beautiful press-printed book. It lives on a coffee table. It is picked up; it is interacted with; it lives. I still have all the images from that wonderful weekend years ago, but the only ones we look at are the prints.
We hired someone to do a family portrait. Once again, I really wanted those digital files. Two have been used for avatars on Facebook, and the two images we loved most are on the walls in our home. The 4×6 prints sit in a box, and the digital files, well, we know where they are.
Don’t we all (or at least all of us over the age of 30) have shoeboxes of 4×6 prints from Wolf Camera or Costco that we never look at? I did, and I still do. I had some of the good ones scanned to archive them, but they just changed shoeboxes from a physical one in my closet to a digital one in the cloud. They exist in that same stasis they did when they were in the shoebox. When I talk about prints, I’m talking about something that doesn’t go in a shoebox, digital or physical. The “My Pictures” folder quickly becomes as unwieldy as the dozen photo boxes in the closet.
In the end, we can archive our happy memories or we can live amongst them. Choose life!
How do I go about making prints?
Your easiest and highest-quality option is to have me do it. We offer a range of materials and sizes, ranging from 8x10s to 30×40″ pieces of wall art. All of our print options can be found here:
What if I want to do the printing myself?
The files I have supplied you are sufficient to print an 8×10. Larger prints require you to use my print services. Additional processing is necessary prior to making larger prints. If you are looking to make your own 8×10 prints, my first recommendation would be a company called MPIX. They are the retail side of Miller’s Photo Lab and do very nice work at reasonable prices. Most importantly, the color profiles for the prints will be accurate.