Simon Huggins's blog

Fri, 22 Feb 2008

Photo printing

It's all Paddy's fault.

Back in May I bought a Nikon D80 which is lovely and since then I've been taking lots of pictures. I've also been discovering how easy it is to spend money on camera bits. Anyway, Paddy suggested I get some of the photos I really liked printed up as they look a lot better that way. I was a bit skeptical at first but I got some printed up by fotopic.net in 6x4 to start with.

It took a bit of work cropping them to exactly the right size but I was really impressed. They do a great job of getting the prints to you quickly and my photos looked better printer somehow (though a couple that needed rotation became obvious). Fotopic lets you blow prints up to 15x10 inches and I chose five of the ones I really liked and get those reprinted larger. They look amazing. You can just see so much more.

The only slight technical hitch was that then I had to frame them to put them on the wall. Noone does 15x10 inch frames (if you know of someone that sells clip frames that size tell me). You can get frames in the A4, A3, A2 etc sizes easily. You can get frames in metric sizes that are the same aspect ratio like 60x40cm and ones that aren't like 40x30. Ho hum. I didn't do my homework and expected that fotopic would only sell enlargements that anyone on the high street would easily frame for me.

In the end I went to picturelizard and got them to make me up frames to the right size. They arrived the other day and putting the pictures on the wall makes it all worth while. It's just a shame I paid more for 1 custom frame than I would have paid for 5 almost-the-right-size-but-not frames. They're also not amazing quality (the 3.50 wrong-sized frame from John Lewis is better) but they're on the wall now.

Basically, if you take digital photos, choose some and get them printed. Even 6x4 they look a lot better than on the computer and it's harder to pass round a computer than a pack of photos. And if you get things enlarged then work out how you're going to frame them first.

Comments

Yes, it is all my fault, but they do look good when printed, eh? :)

-- paddy at 2008-02-22 15:14

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