I’ve agonized for a long time about prints and framing. Here’s my personal goal with prints: I want to see my favorite images/memories on my walls, and show them off to family and friends when they visit (obviously, pre-covid). I want to be able to quickly switch out one print for another when I run out of room.
Fifteen to twenty years ago, I would print images, frame them, and then laboriously puncture the walls of the rental apartment with nails to put up the picture frames. Inevitably, the frames I was using were discontinued, and as a result I stopped putting images up since I simply couldn’t afford reframing 50+ photos. When I moved, getting the nails out of the walls left ugly holes that took a lot of work to fix.
Parts of some images have been intentionally blurred because privacy.
That left me with a dislike of frames, and I instead switched to printing images with a white border. I painted my walls in a darker color so the white frames would pop against the darker background color. Also, since the images cover up the walls eventually, the darker color isn’t “depressing” or making the room subjectively smaller.
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This is the nook where my home office is located. It was the first part of the room that I painted so I could put up some images there. Right now, I am in the process of reshuffling the photos, so it looks a bit ... ghastly, but here's the current (work in progress state):
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The gaps will be filled with new prints in the new year.
I started by having some prints made by WhiteWall, and while they were excellent, they were also quite pricy (not debating the price of good quality prints, just saying that if you want 100+ prints, some in larger sizes, it gets prohibitively expensive for me). I found a local store here in Dresden, Germany (tkexe.eu), who matched the WhiteWall quality for a fraction of the price. So that’s where I’ve ordered all of my prints over the past four years (“silk” finish – not glossy, not matte, very subtle texture).
The largest prints I had made are (in centimeters) 60x40 (image above, center image with the cliffs framing the blue fjord), with lots of 40x30 (image above, left of the largest image with the red-glowing mountain range). But I love panoramas, so
I was
blown away by the amazing print quality – on my displays, when I zoomed in at 100%, I was sometimes unhappy with the image quality, but seeing the images in print is just mindblowing. Made me fall in love with my EM1 all over again.
In December of this year (2020), an online photo lab had insane discounts on canvas prints. Instead of 29 Euros for a 20x20 print, they only charged 2,85 Euros. Let’s say, for 2,85 the quality was good enough. I’d have been furious if I’d pay 30 Euros for that, though. To take advantage of the discount, I ordered 36 canvasses, mostly for “fun” memories (selfies, iPhone pictures) and it was fun (and exhausting) to put them up on the wall. Normally, I only print “the best” images, but realized I was lacking the silly, fun moments that make trips memorable. The resolution and print quality is rather poor, but if you stand 6 feet away (and don’t we all have that down by now) it looks good
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I also started to re-arrange some other pictures and found that I now prefer larger spacing between the images. It's a PAIN to measure and to stick the images to the wall when you have to be so precise but it's worth it (I'm just 1,63cm tall so I constantly have to balance on a ladder to get this done – with a yardstick in my hands, sharp pins between my lips, and a photo in arm's reach).
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Then, when I ordered this year’s calendars for the family and good friends, I also ordered a few “fine art” prints on Hahnemühle paper in the “RagTag” finish (from another German company, Saal Digital). Let me just say HOLY MACARONI! I had thought before that my images looked good, but this just blew it out of the water. My images
leaped off the print, they were so sharp I felt myself drawn back into the scene. Absolutely amazing! Of course, the downside is that now, I am reconsidering all the other prints I’ve made over the past four years. I’ll probably end up ordering some of them in the fine art finish, as I can now never go back to the more affordable Silk finish.
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It's sad can't see the astonishing quality of these prints, but let's just say they're worth every penny (or cent, as it is).
I realized that I still have a lot of space in my bed room, though... hmmm.
