PUBLICATION CENTER

Photos can have more visual impact when printed big. These images from New York City parks were output on an HP Designjet L65500 printer for Joel Meyerowitz's exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York.

At photo-industry trade shows, we’re always on the lookout for new trends, ideas, products, and services that can help you be more successful in printing, displaying and selling your photographs. One major printing-related theme at PDN PhotoPlus Expo in October was that photojournalists and commercial photographers of all ages can benefit by producing exhibitions and books of their images.

Exhibitions and books can not only help you promote yourself as an artist, but can also help you earn recognition for your work with charitable causes or popular public events. As you gain greater exposure as an artist, the clients who hire you to shoot portraits, weddings, or commercial photography may be willing to pay more for your everyday work.

Selling books on sites such as Blurb.com can help you find a natural audience for your particular style of photography.

Ted Kawalerski shot this image through the windshield of a car traveling through a tunnel in Milan, Italiy.

For example, photographer Ted Kawalerski said that many high-end buyers of commercial and advertising photography have become much more interested in seeing his personal work so they can get a sense of his vision as an artist. For his month-long “Windows” exhibition at a popular gallery in Chelsea he used Datacolor color-management tools and an Epson Stylus Pro 4800 to make more than two dozen prints of images he had captured in cities around the world over the past 15 years using different types of film and different generations of digital cameras. What the images had in common were compositions that used windows as frames, dramatic backgrounds, or reflections.

At HP-sponsored event, Magnum photographer Thomas Hoepker of Germany started out by talking about how difficult it has become to make money in stock photography—particularly now that Corbis offers 100 million images, Getty offers 60 million images, and iStock Photo has 1.8 million contributors. But he emphasized that one of the benefits digital imaging is that “Now we can do more things for ourselves,” including printing our own exhibitions and collector prints. After creating a traveling exhibition of some of the iconic images from his 40+ years in photojournalism, Hoepker uses an HP Designjet Z3200 to make the wall-size limited-edition prints that he sells for thousands of dollars to collectors.

Joel Meyerowitz talks about some of the images at his exhibition entitled Legacy: The Preservation of Wilderness in New York City Parks.

At the same HP event at PPE, Joel Meyerowitz talked about how he used an HP Designjet Z3200 to print all 75 of the 40 x 50 and 30 x 40 images displayed in his new exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York. Entitled Legacy: The Preservation of Wilderness in New York City Parks, the exhibition displays the best of the 3,000 images Meyerowitz shot during three-year project to document the remaining pockets of “wilderness” in the 29,000 acres of parks in New York’s five boroughs.

Along with the exhibition prints, Meyerowitz worked with the Aperture Foundation to produce a limited edition boxed set that includes a coffeetable book about the Legacy project, a limited-edition book about the Hallett Nature Sanctuary printed on an HP Indigo 5500 digital press, and a pigment-ink print output on an HP Designjet Z3200. Each print and limited-edition book is signed by Meyerowitz.

To give exhibition visitors the sense they are entering the natural world, some of Meyerowitz’s images of trees and rivers were printed as 9 x 12 ft. environmental graphics on HP’s new Designjet L65500 latex-ink printer. These oversized prints were installed as “immersive graphics” on the walls and floors of the exhibition’s entryway.

Hahnemuhle was promoting the fact that environmental photojournalist Daniel Beltra used a Canon ipF6100 printer and Hahnemuhle Sugar Cane 300gsm fine-art paper to create exhibition prints of his images documenting the current state of the rainforests in the Brazilian Amazon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Indonesia. Beltra’s images were part of a larger exhibition in New York that highlighted the work of The Prince’s Rainforests Project.

When Canon announced at PPE that Wilhelm Imaging Research tests have been completed for LUCIA pigment inks, the iPF6100, and several types of Canon media, the WIR report highlighted prints that California landscape photographer William Neill made with LUCIA inks for display and sale in the Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite National Park.

With all of the talk about the value of exhibition printing at PhotoPlus Expo, it’s not surprising that there was a full house for a two-hour Epson-sponsored presentation by John Paul Caponigro entitled The Fine Digital Print. In the presentation, Caponigro presented a quick overview of the best practices related to the 10 elements that go into making exhibition-quality, collectible prints: capture, color management, image editing, printer, inks, substrates, RIP or print driver, quality profiles, lighting, and presentation.  Many of these topics are discussed in a series of white papers that can be downloaded in the Technique section of his website.

In a future post on Studio LexJet, we’ll highlight some of the new options presented at PhotoPlus Expo for finishing, shipping, and displaying exhibition prints.