As you would expect…tips and techniques…..and bits of know-how to pass on
Following on from the high and low key options, here are some different ways to present family portraiture, in duo or triple frames.
Achieving a balance is the key to success and choosing images from the shoot that work together and help to tell the story of the day.
Colour and monochrome images in the same frame can look good together, especially where the colour is kept soft without too much saturation.
There is an increasing tendency for wedding clients to buy a CD of images to accompany their album. This way, they can choose their favourite pictures for the wedding album but continue to share the wider selection of images that we supply, with family and friends, via the internet and by making slide shows. We give a discount on the full price of album and CD for couples wanting to do this, as we only have to process the images once.
A lovely way to share pictures is by setting them to your favourite music, so we are putting together some tips to help you to do this.
We are starting off by showing you how to make use of a superb piece of software that we use to produce many of our own slide-shows, to show your images with music on a computer or TV.
The software is called Pictures To Exe and is very inexpensive – it’s available from WnSoft.
For those who are not familiar with YouTube click on the second button from the right at the bottom of the player to make it full screen (see inset).
Let us have your comments.
Enjoy.
Fine Art photographic printing took a major leap forward in the last few years with the introduction of high quality pigment ink printing. We upgraded to the HPB9180 printer last year and, hey, is it brilliant?! Low metamerism, low bronzing on gloss/lustre papers and bright saturated colour on matte and textured fine art papers make this a very desirable piece of kit. After several months of making prints with this beast, I have come up with a series of papers that work well with it. There’s a growing list of icc profiles available at HP here and it’s a simple process to load them – just follow the instructions in the HP Digital Imaging Monitor.
All of the following papers produced very good results:
HP Advanced Photo Paper Glossy
As you would expect with a paper made for HP pigment inks, this paper gives an excellent result with good detail, low metamerism and only a little gloss differential. It’s a good all round gloss paper and, at 250g/m² it’s a good weight and feels like a wet process photo. Be careful only to choose “advanced” papers from HP and not the more readily available “premium” papers, which are made for dye inks and do not produce as good a result. Unfortunately, in the UK, it’s quite difficult to obtain HP’s own paper in anything above A4 size.
Epson Premium Semigloss Photo Paper
This paper gives an excellent result with the HP inks. There is just a little gloss differential (which you can see if you tilt the print so that the light hits it at an angle). It’s best used with the icc profile downloadable from HP, who seem to have realised that people will make prints with other manufacturer’s papers and cater for it. Thanks HP!
Epson Archival Matte
A good everyday paper with a smooth white finish which takes the ink well. A minor crit is that the paper is rather thin and so the resulting print doesn’t feel too much like a high quality piece of art. It’s great for sending away to competitions though, where it’s light weight (192gm/sq m) is an advantage and it’s the cheapest of the bunch to buy too. (more…)