Printing, Printing, Printing

  I’ve spent a good portion of the last year printing photos. Printing photos for sale, printing for archive and printing for albums. A year ago I wanted a better way to have physical prints of my work. I grew tired at printing mostly larger photos and storing them in archival boxes stacked several feet high. This way of having physical prints is unrealistic unless you have lots of space, lots of patiences and lots of money. There are many who don’t know the cost of supplies for printing photos and the cheapest item is the printer itself. Good paper is expensive and ink is extremely expensive. Besides the cost and storage of archival boxes an absolute headache is finding and showing someone a print. You have to dig through boxes preferably with white gloves on and it’s almost impossible to keep dust out and not damaging a print or two, especially if you let the person look on their own. 

   My solution, and I know I’ve talked about this before is the portfolio book. It’s much easier and cost effective to build a library of your work that can be stored on bookshelves like a set of encyclopedias as well as looked through unsupervised. When starting off your first instinct might be to buy larger portfolio books such as 11x17, 13x19 or even 17x22 which kind of defeats the purpose or cost and size for both storage and transportability. The 8.5x11 portfolio book is the perfect size and at a time before digital printing was considered a normal print size. My preference for these books is the Itoya Advantage which is well made, no sharp corners, holds 48 photos and costs around $13 each. To date I’ve assembled 20 of these portfolios with almost 1000 photos.