Improving my presentation - Part 1: Larger Prints

As I mentioned last year, my plan for 2007 was to have a much improved presentation in my booth. Well, I didn't work at it nearly as much as I intended over the winter. Procrastination got the best of me, and I decided to enjoy spending times on non-photography stuff. However, for the last few months I've been ramping up and getting things done. I'm getting there slowly but surely. In the process, I'm making a number of changes.


I'm going to try and do something in my blog I haven't done in a while: make regular updates (at least for a while). I'm going to break this article into bits and pieces, and post a new piece every day or two. For now....here's part 1:

The first thing I want to do is have some larger print options. My largest matted size is 16x20 (11x15 print), and then I've also got a few 18x24 framed pieces (12x18 print) but I don't carry them separately matted (doesn't make sense to carry 2 sizes so similar).

The problem there is that I want something even larger. I started thinking about what size to offer. Nothing good came to mind. I kept jumping back and forth between different options. On one hand, I was looking for something that was a proportional size to my prints (1.5 ratio) so that I wouldn't have to crop. At the same time, I kind of dislike uneven borders on a print. This always left me coming up with some oddball sizes, and that brings me to the other hand of the equation...frame size. I really want to try to keep my prints so that they fit a standard frame size that you can easily find at the store. Finally, the last important point was to have the size be different enough that it isn't very similar to what I already offer.

So I started thinking of sizes. At this point, I don't even remember all the sizes that went through my head, so I'll cut almost to the chase. I decided to forgo the standard size frames. I figured people paying for more expensive prints would be more likely to be willing to pay to have it custom framed. Thus, I settled on a 16x24 print matted to 24x32.

That wasn't the end, though. I realized that was SO close to a standard 24x36 frame, so it might be better to go for that size. So now the choice was: uneven borders or crop. Well, looking through my photos, most of my best ones are landscape, and landscape tends to look a bit more impressive when its in a wide panoramic format. So I settled on cropping my pictures to 16x28. This is probably how I will do most of them. However, I have a few shots that don't quite work. Some of them can be stretched just a tiny bit to make them fit. Others just look wrong. For those, I'm still not sure whether to go for uneven borders or a custom (24x32) frame size. This question probably won't be answered for a little while.

In my next entry, I'll cover just how to get these larger prints onto paper