Twin Geeks Photography

For those who don’t know me, I should preface this post to say that I’m mostly a self-taught photographer, and recently started dabbling in print making and framing my work.  I’m a firm believer in experience being directly porportional to mistakes made – and by that metric, I should be pretty dang experienced.  I also try to not take things too seriously and laugh at my mistakes, and share them openly in hopes that others won’t repeat them.

That out of the way, let me show you what *not* to do on framing a piece of artwork:

The cuts are technically perfect – or pretty damn close.  There is some blade deflection in cutting the double bevel – something I’ll fix the next time by building an extension to the mat cutter.  But in the process of working out the border sizes – I had forgotten that I’m now framing things with a 3″ border instead of a 2″ border.  As such, I cut an almost perfect double-bevel opening 2″ too wide.  And if not for the fact that my cheap test ink-set in my Epson 4000 (the subject of another article) looks like mud – I’d be tempted to just re-crop the image in LightRoom and run a bigger print.  This was about 2, 3 hours of work down the drain.  (It took 2-3 hours because I was documenting as I go for this blog post – and screwed up the first go-around by cutting the bevels backwards.   In theory, I should be able to do this in an hour).

Now, that out of the way, let’s look at the framing tools.

First, the mat cutter.  Progressing up from a simple ruler / linear guide (such as Logan’s Adapt-a-Rule) system are board-mounted mat cutters.  They all feature some sort of adjustable fence system, with a base for the mat to be fed onto.  After playing with an Altos mat cutting system that my Dad owned, and the Logan mat cutters at Daniel Smith, I settled on the Logan Intermediate+ 450 model.

The 450 had a few BIG advantages over Dad’s Altos 4501:

• Cuts on the line.  Logan’s design for all their cut heads (pictured below) is that the cutter head cuts on the edge of the guide.  To use it, you simply line up the cut line under the guide’s edge, hook the cut head onto the rail and go.  A U-shaped feature on the cut heads guide the cutter to prevent it from wandering.  This is a HUGE step up from the Altos design, which requires offsetting the guide from the cutline (much like a Skillsaw).
• The 450+ cuts up to 40″ wide.  40″ is the “magic number” in framing.  Pre-cut metal frame strips comes in sizes up to 40″, and 32″ x 40″ is a standard size for matboards and foam board at any well-stocked crafts store.  It is possible to get matboard and frame extrusions larger than 40″, but I’d expect the cost to go up signifcantly, along with the transportation headache.  Besides, very few people have the wall space to hang a 40″+ piece of work, or files with the resolutions required to generate such pictures in the first place.
• At about $160-170, this is a fairly affordable tool.  The next step up is about $350 and adds a longer squaring arm, which I can build myself.  This is a good price point for the features you get.

The Logan mat cutter comes with two cut heads:  a Model 702 Bevel cutter and a Model 701 straight cutter.  The names are fairly self-explanatory:  the Bevel Cutter cuts a 45 degree bevel for the mat openings, while the Straight Cutter cuts mats to size with a straight 90 degree down blade angle.

One other attractive thing about the Logan system is that their blades are widely available.  Michaels, and chances are most local arts store, will carry their replacement blades.  This is not true with the Altos system.  It pays to change blades often (each blade can only make about 10-20 cuts before losing its optimum sharpness) and so blade availability is a BIG deal.

The 701’s blade is fixed – retracting it requires unscrewing the mount screw and physically moving the blade.  It is however very rigid and will cut 4 ply mat board like butter.  Just be careful setting it down, so you don’t gouge up artwork, or ding the blade’s razor edge.

The 702’s blade pivots down into the matboard.  The silver line scribed onto the edge indicates where to start the cut – simply line it up with your reference mark, press the silver button to pin the cutter to the board, and push the handle down.  It’s pretty straightforward.

Not quite a framing tool, but invaluable nonetheless.  This is a Bessey Vario-Angle  strap clamp - used in carpentry and fine furniture making to hold pieces together while glue dries.  As with any tool, it pays to get a good tool and take care of it.  Retails for about $30.00.  If you’re local in Seattle, you can pick this up at Hardwicks, or Woodcraft.  Just don’t bother with Home Depot.

The purpose of this tool is two folds:  When assembling pre-cut metal frame extrusions, it allows all 4 members of the frame to be held in tension and aligned into correct position before the corner brackets are tightened down.  When building wood frames from molding strips, it applies even pressure on all four corners while the glue dries.

Harbor Freight makes a much cheaper alternative.  I personally have not used it, but I believe it will work.  As the Harbor Freight design uses a ratcheting mechanism instead of a screw and nut mechanism to apply the tension, I expect that there will be less granuality in applying clamping force and pressure.  I would consider the HF alternative if I were building multiple wood frames and need to setup the clamping for hours, but for metal framing work, I am quite happy with this little tool.

Rounding up the tool collection is a screwdriver to work the fastening clamps for the metal extrusions, as well as a marking pencil.  I use 4H pencil lead in a 2mm lead holder – this is the same tool that I started learning drafting with, some 20 years ago.   A 4H pencil lead can be honed razor sharp for really clean marking lines.  This particular lead holder has a sharpener built into the cap, which is good for obssessive-compulsive engineers sharpening their lead.

Now that we covered the tools – stay tuned for the next post as to how to mat and frame *correctly*

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framing, printmaking

“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.