Presenting Photo Images 211

Since the start of this course, I've put more and more thought into how I'd like to present my final images. In some ways my design experiences have been a help, but the constant thoughts of the advantages and disadvantages of the various options means that at some point the chosen method is a compromise.

Helping to sort out the college exhibition was cut short, but we'd managed to make a start and that set the ball rolling. Jim, tutor Steve and I measured up the walls and picked the display options that would satisfy the college conditions both on Health and Safety grounds, cost impications, aesthetics and impact. Using Microsoft Publisher I worked out a possible layout, using a scaled 1:100 plan and final mount size of 40x50cm. This is the maximum standard size we use for competitions.

Black mount card was chosen to stand out against the white wall, foam core mount card just 2cm smaller than the mount helped to stand the images off the wall and give a 'shadow frame' effect. We considered frames would be too expensive and as college requirements could not have glass in them we'd have to take out the glass and replace with persex anyway.  As there were 9 in the group this allowed for 2 spaces each.. The 2 walls where the same sizes.  The white core of the black mount card stands out as an edge making precision cutting of the mount less forgiving.

Those of us with previous mount cutting experience brought our kit in and we shared the 1 pencil supplied by our tutor. We did a verbal risk assessment of our cutting equipment confirming the best ways to reduce problems with the very sharp blades, considering the task I opted to take the remaining mount card home and use my picture framing guillotine to save using the more tricky Stanley knives. I wasn't entirely happy with the crop of my images as by mistake I'd had them printed at A3 full page rather than retaining the original dimensions.

Final Image Presentation
Looking at the various choices, I'd decided to print my final selections for the two themes to serve as a record of the course and a portfolio of images for future use. I've been generally happy with the print quality of my Canon Pixma iP4600 and had borrowed a Rexel binder to make an A4 booklet using double sided matt photopaper but just printing on one side. It worked OK, the downside being that the images are printed at a lot less than A4 to allow for the binding, but it was transportable however it was easily marked.

I'd considered making an on line album, having used Snapfish in the past, and took my hard disc drive to Australia where I could have worked on the upload via tha internet and had the final album posted directly to college.  The problems are that there is no check of the images before you print the whole album and there are constraints on the image size so unwanted cropping can occur. I was given an extension to the course and decided against this method, but will probably print one for my family.

The method I've chosen is to use an A3 folder and mount the images printed at A4 on A3 black card. I don't like viewing the picutres through the transparent plastic sleeves but this does give them some protection from finger prints etc. I also don't like flipping the book to view the pictures so I've grouped all the landscape ones and all the portrait ones together. I've specifically chosen only portrait orientation images for my Hands theme. Having set out to do this I decided to save money and have my Canon original ink cartridges refilled at Cartridge World. Print quality was immediately affected and I ended up ditching the refilled inks anyway.  I'm reasonably happy with the calibration of my monitor to my printer and used Fujifilm Premium Gloss 270gms for the Hand theme images and Ryman double sided matt 200gms for the family portrait after unsuccessful results with other combinations (Canon Photopaper Pro II had a slight sepia tinge.)

This is going to be the front cover