What happened was, someone wanted to buy a print of one of the photos here, and doing that turned out to be fun and have fringe benefits, so now anyone can.

We have a nice Canon i9900 printer and I find that I actually enjoy setting up prints and holding them in my hands. Plus when I give them away as Christmas or birthday or soccer-coach presents, people seem happy to get them. The trouble is, we have only so many walls to fill, and only so many coaches and relatives to pester with presents, so the printer goes idle for months at a time.

Recently, there was a comment on a piece here saying “Nice pic; you sell prints?” I sort of snickered at that because I’m a computer programmer dammit, but then he followed up with an email. So I named a price and he said “sure” and this afternoon I missed one quarter of the NFL game while I ran off the print. It turns out the customer has a good eye; what I thought was a fairly ordinary picture came out remarkably appealing on upmarket paper. Thanks Mr W!

I don’t really have time to put much work into this. But Lauren runs the family’s corporate web ranch at Textuality Services, Inc., and she said “Why not? Offer them for sale on the blog, we already take Paypal and I can handle the printing and shipping.” And her eye for color accuracy is much sharper than mine.

I had to modify the giant 2003-vintage splodge o’ code that generates this humble publication, but that turned out not to be too hard, and there’s a fringe benefit. You’ve always been able to click on the pix here to see a larger version, but as part of this project I wrapped ’em in a grey frame and I think they look very pretty that way. Here’s an example, click on it to see the effect.

Bedraggled blossom

So even if nobody else ever buys another one, it will have been worthwhile. And if anyone does, it gives me a warm glow to know that others share my appreciation of certain captured moments.



Contributions

Comment feed for ongoing:Comments feed

From: John Cowan (Jan 11 2010, at 11:18)

Truth in advertising, please: these are not hand-made prints, as the ad copy says; that implies negatives and a darkroom. They are hand-packaged prints, or something like that.

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From: CD (Jan 11 2010, at 12:51)

You should upload these photos to some of the foto search sites, where people can download them and use them. They will pay you a royalty too. It's not much, like $1.00 or something, but if it's a great pic and hundreds or thousands of people use them, it is probably worth the few minutes it takes. =/

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From: Tim (Jan 11 2010, at 13:26)

Gimme a break, John. I'm old enough to remember futzing with the negative developer and then (real fun) making prints with an enlarger and hanging them up on clothespins to dry.

The amount of work was not notably greater (nor less) than today's process via Lightroom and Elements and color profiles and choosing paper and running off proofs and maintaining the printer. If I took the photo-file down to the droids at the drugstore, that wouldn't be hand-made; these are.

And, by the way, the prints I make today look miles and miles and better than what I got way back when in the darkroom.

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From: Robert Young (Jan 16 2010, at 07:05)

>> The amount of work was not notably greater (nor less) than today's process via Lightroom

Tim, I've printed Cibachrome. It ain't like printing B&W. There's no red light. It's total darkness. And you have to mess with the filters every time you change either paper batch or chemical supply.

John's right. OTOH, I doubt that anyone expected you to be darkroom printing. Today's kiddies have never heard of one.

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