Agree? Damn! We're in a tight spot! <g>
I call what I think you're talking about a "float", that is, the image floats
with a border of the paper around it, usually a half-inch on the sides and top,
and a smidge more at the bottom for balance and to leave room for the
signature. One year I tried filling the mat hole with image and 1) I didn't
like the way it looked, and 2) i didn't like signing the mat instead of the
image. Of course this assumes you either want or need to sign your prints. <g>
Sorta stumbled on the 12x18 matted to 20x26 by accident. The 12x18 is the
native size of a D3 12.1mp image at 240 dpi or pip or LSMFT or whatever. The
wider mat allows the image to sit in there while the viewers' eyes travel down
that tunnel of light to the image itself. Most people seem to think that's
large enough, though I've sold a lot of 10x15s matted to 16x20, and the bread
and butter at the craft shop venues is what amounts to a 7x10 matted to 11x14.
Frankly, that's about as small as I want to go. I have done smaller. Five by
sevens matted to 8x10 and even 3x5s matted to 5x7. Sold a lot of the smaller to
people who are 1) cheap and 2) like to do groupings, but the
labor-materials-to-profit ratio just isn't there. I stopped doing them
altogether. It was one of the first steps on my road to what I hope will be
liberation. <g>
This year I'm going to take Moose and Chuck's advice and try printing images to
the size I think they ought to be, but somewhere between that 7x10 to 12x18
range. It doesn't sound like much, but prints matted at 11x14 or 16x20 or 20x26
look vastly different. Moose talked about one of mine when he was here that
doesn't work small, and is so-so large, but is eye-popping at the 10x15 matted
to 16x20 size. The problem I envision is always imagining the print will look
better large. <g>
For anything bigger, such as the 20x30 canvas prints, I'm going to let Miller's
or some other professional lab handle them. I have one image I want to have
done on metal before the gallery opens in June, but I have to find place that
does really good metal prints. I don't think Miller's does them, and as AG
noted, Miller's is really people-oriented.
--Bob
On Mar 24, 2012, at 1:35 PM, Ken Norton wrote:
> Wow! Stop the presses! Bob and AG are in agreement!!! :)
>
> The vast bulk of my sold art prints through the years have been a maximum
> of that size. I've sold much larger, but those are rarities, not the norm.
> I'm not sure how many of those bed-spread sized prints actually sell. There
> aren't that many McMansions out there with people willing to spend $6000
> for a piece of wall-art that doesn't have brush-strokes all over it. I know
> most of my work isn't that good and I'm not famous enough.
>
> My sweet spot seems to be 11x14 matted to 16x20 or 20x24. Also, I generally
> don't print to the edges, leaving between 1 and 3 inches of border around
> the image. For images from 35mm film and from sub 10 megapixel sensors,
> this appears to be about the maximum enlargement before the image starts to
> fall apart. A few images, because of subject/composition, have no upper
> limits in size, but the bulk of my images are composed for that 11x14 print
> size in B&W, 12x18 for color.
>
> Thinking back through the trends of the 23 years I've been selling prints,
> the vast majority have been 12x18" with 1" border to provide adequate
> overrun for mounting and matting. But that statistic is a little skewed
> because I've only been rolling my own B&W prints for less than half that
> time.
>
> Another trend I've seen come and go a few times over the years is photo
> groupings. Instead of one big print, people will buy two or three smaller
> ones that work together as a group. Bordered 8x10" prints have done very
> well in this regard. (by my standards). But those seem to work best when I
> compose and shoot specifically for it. Just picking two or three prints to
> work together doesn't cut it. I actually compose for the eye-flow from one
> print to the next.
>
> Which reminds me, I never did complete my mega contact-print project. I
> started working on it, discovered that my accuracy wasn't good enough and
> then ran out of time. I also really need to get a 2-way pano-head to do
> this right.
--
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