Pixiq

Let me be honest, I became a photographer because I fell in love with photographic prints. I grew up in New York City and I would visit the photography collection at the Museum of Modern Art a lot. I was young and impressionable and the images by Sullivan, Adams, Bresson and Capa did me in. I'd stare at them for hours, mesmerized by the elegant silver prints and I knew that I had to be a photographer and make pictures like these.

Although I enjoy the fluidity of the virtual image world, the printed photograph has been and remains my first love. I feel that it is the best and most powerful medium for images, and there is nothing to compare with having the experience of showing friends and family (or a gallery owner or publisher) a stack of big prints and getting an “Oh, wow” response from them.

Today, too many photographers overlook prints and think only in terms of virtual images. That’s a shame. The digital screen image is momentary and rather flat. It is “here today and gone today.” Paper prints are for the present and the future, and like an old friend, you revisit them again and again, and they add richness to your life.

Part of the difference between digital images and printed ones is, I think, the selection process; that is the editing down of hundreds of images to just a few to print. Digital cameras and reuseable memory cards have, I believe, made us trigger-happy and sloppy. We overshoot and under-edit. Printing photos is a good exercise to help you get over those bad tendencies and back in control of your images. Printing photos will sharpen your vision and you’ll be surprised that many images that looked good on a screen look awful as prints. Prints are a great test of the strength of a photograph.  

In the chemical darkroom, the selection of the right paper to fit an image, was accepted as part of the creative process. You had to choose from among many surfaces, sizes, tones, and contrasts to find the right paper for a particular image. Well folks, here is the surprise. These choices still exist and there is a completely new world of papers--elegant and tactile ones-- just waiting for you to use to make your virtual images into real photographic prints.

The Basics of Inkjet Papers.

Print papers, and here we are talking about inkjet papers, have three basic qualities, surface, weight and size.

When I buy paper, my first consideration is the surface. Paper manufacturers seem to believe that most people want paper that has a surface so glossy that they can see themselves reflected in it. They produce paper with names like Everyday Glossy, Glossy, Super Glossy, and Pro Glossy Pro Glossy II and so on. How glossy you want a print is a personal choice. Glossy surfaces appear to make colors deeper and richer, but there is a lot of variation and theere is no one answer to which will be the best glossy paper for you.

However, I’d urge you look beyond the world of the glossy, and explore papers with matte surfaces, pearl and satin surfaces and a whole range of textures like linen, bamboo, and canvas. You can get papers made of rag, for archival longevity or coated with baryta (barium-sulphite) for extra bright whites.

A good way to learn about papers is to buy a photo sampler package. These are relatively inexpensive packages of an assortment of paper surfaces to print on. Both Innova and Pictorico (Gekko) offer letter-size sampler pages of their papers for less than $10. It is a way you can have fun experimenting with how images will look printed on different surfaces. It can literally be an eye opening experience that will add to, if not change your photography.

The Gallery photo that leads this post shows a glossy print of an actor on the left and a matte print of a soft focus Holga image that I sepia tones. On a PC screen in this image, it is hard to tell the difference between the two. That is my point about the flatness of the image on a PC or iPad. The difference between the two in "real life" is very large. The matte surface is effective in adding a sense of “oldness” to the soft, sepia image. Reverse these images, print the actor on matte and the kid on glossy and both images would lose their impact. And on a PC screen they both suffer.

The next thing I look for when buying paper is its weight. For photographic prints, I like heavy papers that weigh at least 200 grams per square meter (g/m2). Paper weight, is always indicated on the paper package so check it out before you buy and avoid flimsy, cheap stuff.

Enter the Size Monkey

The standard digital camera frame, (which is the same format as 35mm fil frames) is in a 3:2 aspect ratio; that is the ratio of the length to height. Traditional American photographic papers came in 4x6 inches, 5x7, 8x10, 11x14, and 16x20 inch sizes. Except for 4x6 inch paper, none of these papers are in the 3:2 proportion and that meant that when printing full page you were going to either lose part of the l image or print full frame have empty white space around the image. The Gallery photo of the Camel Drover shows the full frame image on top and the full page image below. Notice how much of the sides of the image are lost in the full page print/

Inkjet printers use letter size, 8 ½ by 11 inch paper. Other inkjet photo paper sizes are 4x6, 5x7, 11x17 and 13x19 inches. Again, except for the 4x6 inch paper, none of these sizes is of a 3:2 proportion. If you shoot 16:9 format images, this problem is worse still. Something has to give and for me, I simply accept lots of white space.  

With all of this let me add, for what it is worth, that my choices of paper for printing are Canon Photo Paper Plus Glossy II (260 g/m2) and Epson Archival Matte Paper (192 g/m2—yes, a little light but still quite stiff.)

Looking for inkjet paper the best place to go is to one of the very big photo supply websites  www.bhphotovideo.com or www.adorama.com or www.amazon.com 

Photos & text © 2011 Steve Meltzer