I have normally used darkroom or a photo lab for my final prints. I love doing prints, especially if I frame them and hang them on the wall. Something about putting the print behind glass with a clean mat and frame around a print completes the whole process. Like adding the perfect watch and shoes to a suit. There isn’t anything more satisfying in photography when you can hang that print on a wall and look at it.
There is also the printed page. Many photographers goal is to publish a book or zine. With modern technology available it is very easy and affordable to self publish a body of work. The approach to printing work is vast nowadays. Yet, many still don’t print the photographs they make. Folks seem to want to stop at the phone screen and share it online to other screens. I have never gotten the satisfaction from stopping at a screen presentation as I have by taking my photographs all the way to paper.
When print on demand came to the scene I started creating family albums of trips we would take with my extended family. I could print a dozen of these bound books with linen covers and pass them out to the family a few weeks after we all came home. They were well received and still sit on everyone’s bookshelves. The quality wasn’t offset press quality but that isn’t what mattered. The books can sit on a shelf and be picked up at anytime, flipped through and all the memories of the trip come flooding back. No screen required.
In a post I made earlier I shared that I am building out a darkroom space. It is slow going due to family and work obligations. Life always seems to get in the way of some things. Anyway, while I am still working on that I wanted to print some of my photographs and thought I would look at photo printer options. The last time I tried to get a print out of an inkjet printer that I was happy with was a long, long time ago, and it still wasn’t that great. Back then, at their best they couldn’t hold a candle to a wet darkroom print. Even with all the extra messing around with ink sets and RIPs etc. It wasn’t worth the money or the effort in my view.
Of course things have changed, inkjet printing has come a long way since then. I could have spent a lot of money for a printer but I didn’t want to drop over a thousand dollars on something I might or might not like and use. My real goal was simply to make nice prints of my work for myself that I could evaluate to see if it was worth sending to a lab or wet print myself when I have the darkroom complete. So I hit the used online market places looking for something that would print up to 13×19, print good quality black and white and be under $200 USD.
After a couple of weeks of looking I picked a Canon Pro printer up, in my local area, with full set of inks for $100 bucks. It was a gamble. Many times the printers sit with inks in them for years and are all dried up and crusty, clogged to the point of no return. I thought for $100 I would take the risk. I brought it home, set it up and hit the test print page and… it worked perfectly! I ran a cleaning cycle and print head alignment on it and have been using it ever since.
For now, I use the printer to make small prints (5×7) of images I have only seen on screen so I can pin them up and live with them a while. Being small prints, it is easy to rearrange and practice sequencing for any books I may want to print. Another surprise was that when I see a bunch of these prints lying in front of me I can start to see some connections between them I wouldn’t have otherwise. This creates an opportunity for new bodies of work that I may not have seen before. It has been fun and a new exercise to add to my photography practice.
If you are a photographer, or know a photographer, that doesn’t print their work (a lot of it, not just the good ones) as part of their creative exploration, I would encourage you/them to do it regularly. It’s easy for me to tell you to do it and give the reasons I think it’s important, but the photographer that prints learns more about their work and where to go next when they work with prints rather than screens.
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