Lumière d’Argent

I am in the process of reworking the galleries. Some people have expressed interest in buying prints and others are asking for family portrait sessions.

I have looked at different hosters/printers and concentrated on Smugmug, Zenfolio and Exposure Manager. I opened trial accounts with all three and setup prototype galleries. All three are impressive in their different ways.

Smugmug seems to be the dominant player. They certainly do many things very well, especially support and customer service. They maintain a very active forum that helps to work around most limitations. They have good looking standard galleries that can be customized almost at will.

Zenfolio is the new kid on the block. They have a very modern website, with the fastest display and the best looking standard galleries in my opinion. The allowed customization is more limited than Smugmug but I feel that less is needed too.

Exposure Manager seems to be the oldest player. They have the worse looking galleries and the least user friendly website.

All three use the same print-house: EZ Print. I ordered test prints from SmugMug and Exposure Manager. SmugMug waived the printing and shipping costs to allow for a true cost-free test. I was not charged, but I never received the test prints either. I promptly (6 days) received the prints from Exposure Manager, sent by Fedex and very well packed and protected. The prints are flawless, the Fuji Lustre paper is very nice. I put the print next to the one I did at home from the same file and had to look hard to find minute calibration differences. Very satisfying experience.

I have no doubt my experience of not receiving prints from SmugMug is not typical at all. And if I had complained about it, they would have printed another set and sent it at no cost. There are ample testimonies of their excellent customer service.

I did not ask to get them because at that stage I already had decided for Exposure Manager.

The different reasons come down to the business model. If I setup my galleries with them, the customer still buys from SmugMug more than from me. It is very clear all along the ordering process. Smugmug is a photo sharing website with extra services for professional photographers.

Exposure Manager, on the other hand, is much more like a sub-contractor. The customers do not see them, they see me. And that’s important. For example, Exposure Manager gives me the customers details like names and addresses, while SmugMug does not.

So I went with Exposure Manager and their much cruder galleries. The templates they provide are not very good looking in my opinion. However, with some HTML work, it is possible to customize quite heavily and get it close enough to what I want. I’ll refine later.

Next stage: expanding the galleries to include much more older works.

Stephane :: Dec.15.2007 :: Printing, Sales :: 3 Comments »

Interesting discussion at Paul Butzi’s blog.

I am myself in the process of thinking it all, especially after my last (in every sense of the word) local exhibition.

Why last? Well, it simply does not make sense. The total number of people who saw that exhibition is about the audience I have on my meager web galleries in three days.

And yet, and yet, four prints sold! That is both bad and good. Obviously, economically it is a bad result. The return is a small fraction of the investment, even without including the time involved. On the other hand, four different people I don’t know have decided they like a print enough to give 45€ ($65 at current rate) to have that print on a wall at their home! That’s astonishing.

So there might be something to do.

But spending so much to sell so little is out of the question.

Someone told me once that marketing is about four P’s: Product, Price, Promotion, Place.

In this case the product is certainly not the result of a market study. It is what I like to do and I am not all that compelled to tailor prints to market trends. I already have a day job.

I have seen that exhibitions are not a proper place. Not enough traffic. Either the gallery or the artist have to be known, preferably both. But an exhibition of an unknown photographer at an unknown place is not going to work. Duh!

Promotion is probably the big unknown, unexplored, part. What drives traffic here is participation to photography forums. Not exactly smart marketing To be investigated.

So, back to the price. If, and that’s a big if, it is a determining factor once the other three P’s have been rightly nailed remains to be seen. The thing is, I have not exactly nailed the other three P’s… And, can price compensate unprofessional marketing? Unlikely, I’d say.

But still, like, Paul Butzy says:

I clearly recall reading about Jay Dusard giving prints to the cowboys he’d photographed, and how the cowboys would take these exquisite Fine Art Photographic Prints and thumbtack them up on the wall next to the stove, where they’d get all greasy and marked up but where the cowboys would enjoy them non-stop. Way back when I read that, I had this glimmer of thinking that perhaps the cowboys were right and that the Greater Art World is wrong, and that perhaps prints ought to be priced really, really low. So low that essentially anyone can enjoy them, even if enjoy them means taping them to the refrigerator door in the kitchen.

By reading the comments on Paul’s blog, it looks like that Brook Jensen article impressed others like it did to me. If I remember correctly his argument was that a CD costs less than $20, even ones with extremely good work that takes years to create, perfect and polish (when I write this I think of HAL). And well, this is art, isn’t it?

I honestly do not think any of my prints are worth more than a CD. I understand a part of the market is still ready to pay “art prices” for prints, but I’m afraid that population is shrinking.

So, I have started an experiment. I am setting up new galleries with an facility to order prints. I have set the prices to be on the affordable side and we’ll see what comes out from that.

The prints are not carbon ink on 100% cotton rag. That’s simply too expensive when one factors in the cash collection, processing, printing and shipping. So they are digital photographic prints made on a Fuji Frontier by quality fanatics professionals. I have order a few sample prints and everything was perfect. Communication, shipping and print quality. Besides, they offer a 30 days warranty period.

My feeling is that a photographer is not often a person who knows how to industrialize a process and deal with customers. Maybe it is better to leave that at people who know how to do that part and concentrate on the photography itself.

Stephane :: Dec.14.2007 :: Printing, Sales :: 2 Comments »

Last exhibition was printed on Moab Entrada Natural with Epson K3 inks. It worked well, but having since switched back to Piezography, I ran a few comparisons between what I had in stock. It turns out that Entrada is somewhat duller with NK7 inks while Hahnemühle Photo Rag really shines. Deeper blacks, more sparkle in the highlights, and something I can’t really identify combine to give much more pleasing prints. NK7 on Entrada are good prints and I would probably not find flaws if I had not compared to the same on Photo Rag. But I did. And it is like someone turned on the light on the Photo Rag one. Hard to believe.

A close examination also shows the print surface is flawless with Photo Rag while Entrada surface shows some light reflections, as if the ink was not completely absorbed. I have used Entrada a lot with early Piezography and MIS UT7 without noticing that problem, so maybe I could try to create my own Entrada curve with less ink and see. It would not give the higher DMax, though and probably not the nicer tone of Photo Rag.

A problem with Photo Rag is the price, though. Nearly twice compared to its competitors.

I don’t have time before the exhibition to order and test Innova and Bradford papers, but I surely will after the exhibition. Innova is supposed to be very very close to Photo Rag with NK7 and it is sold around the same price as Entrada.

In the meantime, Photo Rag is back!

Stephane :: Oct.21.2007 :: Printing :: 5 Comments »

This blog is about my transition from film to digital, from using a view camera to using a Canon EOS 5D as my main camera. My digital transition started years ago, however. It started at the other end of the chain: printing. It all happened when I moved from a large apartment where I had a permanent darkroom to a smaller one that I share in a more expensive city. Space having become a premium, the permanent darkroom was not realistic anymore. Having started a year before to explore film scanning and digital printing for colour, I started to see what I could do in B&W.

It soon appeared my Epson 1290 could not produce acceptable B&W prints. Well, no ink-jet printer at the time could, unless one used specialized B&W ink-sets. The one that started it all was Jon Cone with its Piezography. So I stared with a Piezography ink-set for my 1290. It was hard, expensive and frustrating but after a few weeks of sweat and tears I started to produce prints at least as good as what I had been able to do in the darkroom. At the same time, the missed Barry Thornton released his last book ‘Elements of Transition’ that told his own transition from wet to digital printing. That book is still valuable reading today.

The Piezography ink-set I used then was called PiezoTone Neutral. It was neutral all right, and metamerism-free but decidedly warm, very warm, and limited to matte papers. So I became interested in their competitor, MIS. MIS had developed a variable tone ink-set which included support for both glossy and matte papers. The dream come true. So I got that and used it nearly 2 years. It was never really good on glossy but in the mean time I had discovered the Moab Entrada and had started to really like the matte cotton papers.

Then Cone released his Neutral K7 ink-set, promising better neutrality than the old PiezoTone set and variable tone by using different papers. And, 7 levels of gray instead of 4. Initially I thought 7 levels to be overkill but the user reports were raving about incredible smoothness. Anyway, what caught my attention was the promise to get neutral tone without a blue toner ink to mix. That blue ink in the MIS set creates problems to get a finely linearized neutral curve with QuadToneRIP. It is possible, but certainly not easy. With the NK7 I would not have to deal with it. Another appealing claim from Cone was that the ink-set was designed to avoid head clogging, even when the printer is not used often. That had been a major problem with the Ebony ink. It will never clog if you print at least once a week. But don’t go push it much further because then it will clog and it can be very hard to clean. Besides, while allowing cooler prints, they never completely matched Piezography in pure beauty.

Before switching to NK7, I had fallen for the Epson hype about K3 and their so-called Advanced Black and White mode. That was quite a disappointment so I had no problem ditching the K3 and replacing them with NK7. I went for a continuous inking system to reduce the ink cost and avoid the nearly constant cartridges replacements and their ink waste the R2400 imposes.

At last, finally, an ink-set that delivers for B&W printing. This is just great. It is smooth, it is beautiful, it is neutral, tones do vary with paper, it is easy to calibrate and profile, predictable, reliable and clogs a lot less. Yes, it can still clog when the printer is left idle too long, like 3-4 weeks, but it is much easier to clean than an Ebony clog.

What can be improved:

Clogging: as I it still does happen more than with the original Epson inks. Not a show stopper, a very moderate usage is enough to prevent it and the Epson cleaning routine clears it, albeit wasting a lot of ink.

DMax: It depends on the paper. On Hahnemühle PhotoRag I get 1.58, not too bad. On Moab Entrada Natural I get 1.49, not really glorious and Epson Velvet Fine Art is unusable with a DMax of 1.32! How does it compare to silver paper? Well, I used quite a lot of Agfa Paper. Agfa claimed a DMax of 2.1. I did not have a densitometer at the time, but it should be noted to get a silver paper to DMax, you need heavy over-exposure and very long development. After around 1.8-1.9, the density curve gets very flat, killing the contrast in that range. On the other hand, with a prover calibration, NK7 gives a linear progression up to its DMax, so the whole range is fully usable. So we should compare DMax 1.58 for NK7 (my best case so far) with 1.8 for silver. A real difference, but not night and day. Still, I wish we could get more.

Price: $44 for 4oz. (118ml). Everyone agrees Epson charges a lot for their inks, but this is very close to Epson prices. I understand there is a lot of research involved and we are on a niche inside a niche market.

Shipping price: Probably due to relatively low volumes, UPS shipping from Cone to Europe is atrociously expensive, making the total cost of the inks even higher. B&H carries a small part of the Piezography range, why not the whole range? B&H has very good UPS prices.

All in all, this is the best solution I have found for B&W printing.

Stephane :: Feb.05.2007 :: Printing :: No Comments »