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Analyzing & Displaying the Print

Lesson 29 from: Photographing Panoramas for Large Prints

Mike Hagen

Analyzing & Displaying the Print

Lesson 29 from: Photographing Panoramas for Large Prints

Mike Hagen

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Lesson Info

29. Analyzing & Displaying the Print

Getting great prints is about more than color calibration and proper print settings -- the room the image will be hanging in matters too, particularly the ambient lighting. Hagen takes students through the process of analyzing the print and prepping for the final display.

Lesson Info

Analyzing & Displaying the Print

Let's talk about viewing and displaying the prints. Alright, we've gone through all of the hard work, we've made the beautiful prints, and now we want to look at them, and enjoy them. How do we do that? Well, some of you will just pick them up in the room, and look at 'em, and that's fine, 'cause if that's gonna be where they're displayed, great. Some of you will want to pixel-peep, you know, some of you will want to hold up that print, and look at it like this. That's inappropriate. That's inappropriate print-viewing, OK? Because you're too critical, you know, a lot of times we just need to pull back a little bit and look at it. You know, there's a print we have over here, it's a black & white of the boats. If you guys in the studio audience today, if you go look at that print, you will actually see a little bit of banding up in the sky, and you'll see it if you get really close to it. But man, when you look at it from back here, it's fine! Looks great! So, be nice to your prints,...

view them at the proper distance, maybe four or five feet away. Check your room lighting, make sure that your room lighting is sufficient, that it's bright enough, it's not too warm, make sure that there's not a lot of daylight influence. The time of day matters. Are you viewing at night, are you viewing it at high noon? And then, what's the location of your installation? Are you doing this for a client? If someone's paying you for this print, then take it to their location before you reveal it to them. Put it on their wall, and make sure it looks good at their location. You might have to reprint it. And if color accuracy is important to you, then you can go off and you can buy stuff like this. This is a viewing station, and this is a small one that fits on your desk. It's by a company called Just Normlicht, and they make big ones, too. They make big ones like, bigger than this TV, giant print-viewing stations, so you can do that when color accuracy is imperative. You know what, for me, though, my room's neutral color, and most of this stuff's going to be displayed in my house, and so I just look at it at a proper viewing distance, and if it looks good, I'm a happy man. How 'bout displaying the prints? Now you gotta get this stuff on the wall, 'cause you want people to look at it. They look good on the floor, but they look even better on the wall. There's a lot of ways to display your prints. Think about where it's going to be. Is this at your home? Do you actually have space at home to put a six-foot wide print? Mm-hmm. She says yes, she says no. Yeah, some people do, some people don't. So think about that. Think about, is it going to a commercial installation, like a hospital, something like that. A lot of hospitals have really big walls, so you can create big, big presentations. The other thing I want to talk about is framing. Framing can be so expensive! I sell a lot of my prints to private clients, and when they see how much framing costs, they almost fall on the floor. They're like, "Ah, this is too much!" You know, I charge a certain amount of money for my print, a lot of times framing doubles that, or sometimes triples that. Here's the least expensive way, I've found, to display my prints. I use foam-core. And, we'll just use this one here, we haven't shown this one yet today. So here's a photo of the Narrows Bridge in Tacoma, Washington. And, on the back, I just mounted it on foam-core. And it's super simple to do this. You basically cut the foam-core to the exact same size as your print, and then I use this adhesive here, Photo Mount, you can get this from a lot of different manufacturers. But what I do is, you just spray this on the foam-core, or you spray it on the backside of your print, and then very carefully, you align it, and lay it down. And then I just, I wear, like a long-sleeve on my shirt, and I just kind of wipe across it like that to kind of push it down and mount it. That's all I did for this, and it works great. I just did an installation for a church about three weeks ago, and I made probably eight or ten of these on foam-core, and they have them up now on their walls and they look fantastic. So, really inexpensive way to mount and display. Metal prints, of course, they can look really good, metal prints just really pop off the metal, they are fantastic. And then canvas frames are, a canvas frame is a really neat way to go, 'cause you don't have to actually pay for the wooden frame, so it's a less expensive way to have a glorious-looking print on the wall. So that's displaying prints. Couple of installations, this is a friend of mine, he runs the Gig Harbor Fly Shop in my hometown, and he wanted me to make a giant print of one of his favorite fishing locations. So, this is on his wall, this is four feet high, twelve feet long. So this was a business installation, really fantastic. I love going in there. Any time I have a visitor coming into my hometown, I'm like, "Hey, come on out, I want to show you this giant print I made. I'm proud of it." I love showing off my prints in other people's locations. And then this is my house. And so, this is this print on the wall at my house, and that's a nine foot by three foot print. I printed that on-line at an on-line printing company. So, it's self-adhesive, too, so this one, you just actually stick the print to the wall. It worked out really well.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Panorama Checklist & Gearlist

Ratings and Reviews

Fred Morton
 

Get it, get it and get it. I bought Mike's Speedlight course and this is on the list after watching it on line. The course design by Mike with the Creative Live staff is a successful blend of content and presentation. I absolutely loved how Mike took us on location for several shoots, where we could see the setup and problems that he had to resolve. This is a must have course for photographers interested in landscape work. Another powerful part of this class is Mike's willingness to demonstrate and show us what didn't work. The practical experience in his course was just like being in the field with Mike.

user a5f3c6
 

Mike combines two characteristics of a great teacher: he's obviously knowledgable and competent about his subject matter and he's relaxed and confident in how he presents his ideas. This class covers everything I need to know about photographing and printing panoramas. But, it is much more. It is a class that shows the essential skills involved in shooting, post-processing, and printing photographs and how to apply them to a specific application: panoramas. I learned a lot! Thanks, Mike.

Sue Sirius
 

This workshop was terrific! I learned so much about taking, processing and printing panoramas (and photos in general). I found the presentation very easy to follow with great examples and instructions. Highly recommend this!

Student Work

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