The times they are a-changin’.
This post seems to be older than 13 years—a long time on the internet. It might be outdated.
It’s been a while since I’ve inducted photos into my portfolio, which is a shame because I’ve had some amazing experience and photographic opportunities over the last year or so. Typically, I did portfolio inductions in coordination with the Spring/Fall photo exhibit at school. Since I’m graduated, I have really had a chance to display my work (although I have made two photo books).
Seattle Academy, my alma avia1, is hosting an Alumni Art Show in the spring, and it’s been so long since I’ve done an art show that I decided to submit two pieces.
I’m planning on submitting them as 30″ x 20″ pieces, which is the largest format I have submitted to date. There are a couple of technical issues to overcome as well. First, is can I even get a decent print at that size for a decent cost? The answer is yes; Costco is on the low end at $8.99, while Kodak Gallery is on the higher end (of this little experiment) at $27.99 for Profession Matte prints. SnapFish and ShutterFly are in the middle in terms of cost. Kodak obviously uses their KODAK Professional Color paper, and Shutter fly uses Fujicolor Crystal Archive photographic paper2, but I can’t figure out what everyone else uses.
Framing is currently going to be done with an Ikea RIBBA frame, which will fit a 19.75″ x 27.5″ photo, which is only a titch smaller than the print. It also comes with a mat, although I’m not sure of its quality since it’s paper.
The other issue is can I really get away with printing at that size? Here’s the math:
My Nikon D70 takes 6.1 megapixel photos at a ratio of 3008 x 2000 effective pixels:
Costco recommends a minimum 115 DPI, SnapFish says 90 DPI, and ShutterFly says 66.6 DPI. Ideally, I would be printing closer to 200 DPI.
However, the other thing that needs to be taken into consideration is the arc length. It would seem to me that if you maintain the same arc angle, as if you had printed it at 200 DPI, since the radius would have to increase, the DPAA (Dots per Arc Angle) would remain constant. In short, if you stand back farther, which you should do since it’s a bigger photo, it should look just fine.
This is all really perfect timing as I just got back to shooting some fun stuff, which I haven’t gotten to do in a while.
I like to wait a couple months before I add new photos to my portfolio, so these won’t make it this time. But enjoy them all the same.
A couple weekends ago I walked around the UW Quad and shoot the cherry blossoms.
48.0 mm || 1/500 || f/4.5 || ISO400 || NIKON D70
Seattle, Washington, United States
50.0 mm || 1/400 || f/1.8 || ISO400 || NIKON D70
Seattle, Washington, United States
This past weekend, I participated in the Seattle Flickr Meetup where I got to play around with some off-camera lighting, including a ring flash, for the UW Garage 11 event. I spent most of the time mentoring another fellow on off-camera lighting, so I decided to get some more practice with my 50mm and be a bit more creative in the Lightroom3.
50.0 mm || 1/125 || f/4.5 || ISO200 || NIKON D70
Seattle, Washington, United States
50.0 mm || 1/125 || f/4.5 || ISO200 || NIKON D70
Seattle, Washington, United States
50.0 mm || 1/125 || f/4.5 || ISO200 || NIKON D70
Seattle, Washington, United States
50.0 mm || 1/125 || f/5.0 || ISO400 || NIKON D70
Seattle, Washington, United States
Special thanks to the models: Vivian Luu (top) and Aisha Rose (bottom).
Anyway, I’m going to be working on selected the next portfolio inductions. Feel free to shout out any favorite photos you have from the last year or so.
0alma mater is Latin for “nourishing mother”, “alma avia” is Latin for “nourishing grandmother”, which seems like the appropriate relation for my high school ↩
Have I become that pretentious? ↩
A darkroom is the place where film is usually developed. Lightroom is a digital darkroom program made by Adobe for editing photos ↩