OK, I don’t really mean all, but when you go through a bunch of images from Africa – they all look pretty exotic. It’s hard to narrow down what to show! I mostly use my images in the travel journals that I write about our trips. Occasionally I’ve entered a few contests (haven’t won anything yet, but it is fun to see what other people are doing and how my images compare). I had quite a few good images from the Africa trip, and it took me a while to decide which photos I wanted to make prints of – and where we wanted to hang them. In the end, the time I took was worth it. I ended up getting myself a great color printer and could do most of the prints myself. And the time away from the images made it easier for me to pick out the best ones. I find I have a lot less favorites a few weeks, or months after a trip, than the week we get back.
Over the years I have found I have alternated between HP and Epson for my color printers. Both companies have excellent printers, but can’t seem to keep the quality up over time. This time I felt that Epson was out in front and I got the Stylus Pro 3800. Now I don’t remember which model HP I was looking at, but there wasn’t a huge difference between the two. Both printers were on display at MacWorld that year so I got to see both printers in action and compare printouts. I get incredible color prints from this printer and can print to the edge of the paper.
Also, the Epson came with a free P-3000 Multimedia Storage Viewer (that probably was the tipping point). I use that viewer to back up my photos on every trip that we take. Even when I take a laptop with me I backup the cards to the P-3000 first (because losing files just sucks).
Scott, my husband, and I decided that we wanted enough images to show the wide range of what we saw on our trip. And we wanted to hang them in the house. The challenge was how to showcase this nicely. Our house has a lot of windows and not a lot of wall space. We decided to make our stairwell a gallery of just Africa prints. A few prints we wanted to make large (24×36) and I sent them out. The rest I printed myself. I can output prints up to 19×22. I measured the wall and worked up a blueprint of the stairwell. Then I took scaled down thumbnails of the photos and worked out a layout that would work up the steps – looking both artistic and giving a good variety of animals. I printed out each image in a variety of sizes and moved them around the blueprint until I had a pleasing setup. Since this was done to scale I then knew how many of each size I needed.
I sent the prints out to be mounted on foam core. This gave the images a clean modern feel and also made them work well grouped closely together (besides being expensive, I thought frames would really detract from the large number of images we wanted to hang). I found removable Velcro mounts that aren’t supposed to take the paint off the wall (haven’t taken the photos down yet so don’t know if that is true or not). I liked hanging the photos with these because I was able to reposition a couple images easily.
We ended up hanging 35 prints in a two-story stairwell. I know that this sounds like a lot, but I think this worked out for a few reasons. One wall of the stairwell is all glass so it is very open, and the stairs are very wide so you have room to step back from the images to view them. There is a variety of sizes for visual interest (and some shots needed to be large, and in some cases I wanted to show a quantity of smaller things). We’ve gotten some good feedback on this gallery setup, so I think it is a success.
Dear Reader: I’m interested in how you do things, please share!
How do you like to share your images with others?