Images by John 'K'

I’ve had sporadic success selling a set of 8 by 10 prints at a local gallery, but recently the owner asked me for a number of larger prints to put on display. Now it’s one thing selecting a bunch of favorite shots to print as 8 by 10 prints, but it’s a whole other ballgame when you start working at 20 by 30! Many of my favorites were from my earlier days of shooting DSLR, and while they looked fine as 8 by 10 prints, the looked ghastly from a quality perspective at 20 by 30. While my early composition was just fine, the technical aspect of my photography wasn’t where it needed to be to support a 20 by 30 print!

The other aspect of this is cost – getting 8 by 10 prints done, even on good quality paper, is relatively cheap, and even with mats and sleeves the finished article is relatively inexpensive. When you start printing at 20 by 30 on good quality poster-board the cost goes up significantly, and so you really need to make sure your choices are going to work well.

With all of this in mind, I chose 3 pictures that I liked and that fitted the guidelines I was given by the studio for the subject matter they were looking for, and got them printed. As with anything you do for the first time, there is always an opportunity to learn and do better, and sure enough, one of the three images looked lousy once printed that large, even though I thought I’d done all the right things to make sure it’d come out looking OK.

Another of the three looked OK, but could have been better and needed a little tweaking to make it really stand out as something special. Thankfully I was more than happy with the third.

So I picked another image to replace the one that was a failure, tweaked and re-printed the second, and now the three 20 by 30 prints are going into the gallery tomorrow to ‘test the waters’.

These are the images I ended up going with…

1) Through the Gate

Through the Gate, originally uploaded by Images by John ‘K’.

2) The Cliff of Many Colors

The Cliff of Many Colors, originally uploaded by Images by John ‘K’.

3) The Lonesome Tree

The lonesome tree, originally uploaded by Images by John ‘K’.