Baltimore Camera Club

3. THE PRINT, MOUNTING AND PRESENTATION

Standardize – It’s very time consuming and labor intensive to print and mount photos at different ratios and sizes. I basically have settled on three ratios for prints - 1:1 (square) 2:1 (panoramic) and 3:2 (regular ratio of 35mm film). With some judicious use of cropping and resizing, rarely will an image fail to fit into one of these sizes. (This may vary depending on what format you’re shooting with, and your style of shooting). This allows for standard matte and materials (printing paper) sizes.
Remember that the BCC lightbox is a fixed size, and the club rules don’t allow for anything longer than 20”, so, for instance, a very long panorama (at, say 4:1 ratio) can have a length of 20”, but a maximum height of only 5”.

Frames – While we’re not allowed to submit framed photos, and double matting can be hideously expensive, a little judicious extra printing can fool the eye and make for a more attractive presentation. I do this on the computer, but I guess some pen & ink work in the darkroom could achieve the same effect.
I make a new blank ‘canvas’ (PS talk for ‘working area’) of the final size I want my image + border to be (for instance, image is 15” x 10”, and a border of ¼” all round, makes a canvas sized 15½” x 10½”).
The software I use makes it very simple to put lines round the outside of the canvas, I’m sure there are similar actions in Photoshop. You can have a basic black border, you can pick a color from the image, or you can alternate colors to simulate a window matte. I then save and name my border file for use on all images of that ratio. You should make sure the ‘border’ file is the same type (tiff, jpeg) and at the same resolution as the image file.
Lastly, I composite (fit inside) the image I’m printing with the border image, making sure that it fits neatly inside. If you resize your original image to fit (in this example to 15” x 10”) it will be much simpler to composite them.
Another small thing to make life easy - at the center point of each side of the border I put a 1 pixel line or mark – this is practically invisible, but makes mounting the print to the matte very easy.

Size Matters! – This is purely a matter of personal opinion, formed from watching our erstwhile judges at work, but the bigger you can make your print, the better it is likely to do in BCC competitions. Many indescribably beautiful, detailed small prints have fallen by the wayside, because the exquisite detail is not obvious to the judge in the approximately 10 seconds she is given to view the print at competition.
(Please address all letters of outrage to the editor!)
Color - The same print when viewed in sunlight, in shade, or in tungsten lamp light will show different color casts. Those of us fortunate enough to have some control over the color temperature of our prints can compensate for this. As time goes on, the viewing box lamps in the BCC lightbox are gradually changing color temperature. The lightbox is on the warm (red) side of 5000° Kelvin (daylight) at the present time. If you can, take into account the viewing conditions, and adjust accordingly when printing. (This applies to all viewing conditions - whether top notch galleries or your dining room).