Twin Geeks Photography

“Woah.  Print and frame my work, in 2 weeks?”

So, a while ago, I won a spot in the Pravda Studios / Seattle Flickrites Gallery show.  Up until that point, I havn’t printed a single picture that I’ve shot – I’ve been content with just displaying my work on an LCD monitor.  Suddenly faced with a photo gallery show, I decided to give myself a crash course on print making and framing of artwork.

It was no doubt an expensive endeavor – I believe that anything that’s worth doing is worth doing well – and even though the rules allow for matted / mounted artwork, I felt that it was important to complete the entire process, both from an academic perspective, and from a presentation point of view.  Afterall, matted prints will get dinged up quickly (have you seen my home office?), and I’d be flushing the printing costs down the drain.

Now, if I had won the lotto, this would have been an easy exercise.  Buy a nice big Epson / Canon ink jet printer, print all my stuff, take to frame shop.  The only problem is that I don’t have the space for a big honkin’ printer, and a frame shop would want about $80-150 per piece framed.  Multiply by the 10 pieces I’m displaying, and I’m looking at blowing a week or more’s worth of take home pay for 10 pieces of artwork that probably won’t sell.   As far as ROI (return on investment goes) that isn’t exactly attractive.

Given the time crunch and budgetary limitations, I chose to go the following route:

• Shop for pre-made frames from IKEA, Ben Franklin, etc – ideally from the discount pile.
• Calculate based on frame size and mat availabilty the size of the prints that I can make to fill the frame.  (See below for calculation notes)
• Ask very nicely at the local frame shop – I used Frame Up Studios in Fremont- great guys – to recut my existing mats, if possible – or cut new mats, if not.
• Borrow time in the engineering lab at work to clean/ reassemble the frames.

Now, with this approach, I actually have a chance of recouping my investment.  It’ll be much more hands-on (although, much more stressful) I’ll definitely learn more.  Below are my results from my little adventure.

Shopping for Frames and Pre-cut Mats

Just like how hot-dog buns comes in packs of 6 and hot dogs in packs of 8 – the size of frames, precut mats, and camera aspect ratios is another prime example of inter-related industries not communicating with each other.  For most DSLR shooters out there, an uncropped image tends to fall into two ratios:  3:2, or 4:3.  The 3:2 aspect ratio stems from the ISO1007 135 film format, where the image size was 36mm x 24mm with a 2mm gap between each image on the negative.  The more common APS-C form factor keeps the same 3:2 aspect ratio also, with a image size of 25.1 x 16.7mm.  Somewhat less common is the 4/3s camera system, which uses a 4:3 aspect ratio to match common non-wide screen computer monitor aspect ratios (VGA @ 640x 480, SVGA @ 800×600, XGA @ 1024 x 768, SXGA @ 1280x 1024, UXGA @ 1600×1200, etc).

However, this doesn’t really help you when you buy pre-cut mats.  After 4″ x 6″ prints, there are no pre-cut mats with an opening that matches the 3:2 ratio.  And if you’re a 4/3rds shooter, the choices are even more bleak.  5″ x 7″, 8″ x 10″, 16″ x 20″ – these dont’ really help you much.  Sure, you can always crop your shots to match these print sizes, but often that is an artistic compromise at best.  And if you’re somewhat adventurous and crop some of your shots to a 16:9 aspect ratio for display on wide-screen monitors … well, good luck finding a frame to hold that.

My frame selection was dictated by cost – I knew that the worksmanship will be sub-par, they’d scratch and ding easily, but IKEA frames were … adequate.  It was a case where we’d say in Chinese that the flour costs more than the bread – at about $15 a frame, including mat and glass and mounting hardware, I’d be paying more in raw material costs alone if I were to try to DIY.  With the understanding that I’ll be printing my shots on Rachel’s Canon Pixma Pro 9000 (max print size:  13″ x 19″)  and competition rules that states a minimum of 8″ x 10″ for prints, I worked out the math to figure that the most economic way to comply with the rules is to print 2 prints per sheet of photo paper.  Therefore, my maximum short-dimension of the print cannot exceed 9.5″ (19″ / 2).  Giving myself a border to work with around the print, I arrived at a print size of 8″ x 12″ (2:3) for my regular “SOOC” crops.

As luck will have it, the pre-existing mat from the IKEA fram has a slightly smaller opening.  So I was able to have the opening enlarged (@$5.00 / mat) at Frame-Up to get the mat sizes that I need.  Problem solved.

In the next installment, I’ll talk about the decision to step up the game a bit and build my own frames and cut my own mats.  Stay tuned.