From the heart warming movie Field of Dreams; if you build a (baseball) fields, they will come.
Thus the idea behind my purchase earlier this week of a brand-spanking new 24″ Canon Pro-2100 printer. If I make bigger prints, I will then sell these!
Up till now I mainly sell 16 x 20″ prints (on the 17 x 22″ sheet) or smaller, except on the rare occasion when I have a larger print made by a friend or lab. Thus my field of dreams is that if I make larger prints (i.e. 24 x 30″) , that these prints will also sell. Since the turn of the century making really, really large photographic prints is not new and has been a trend for a considerable amount of time. Which is to say, that if I had the room, I might have purchased the 44″ wide printer version.
And yes, I have made the transition from using Epson printers to Canon printers, even after my failed attempt with a used smaller Canon Pro-1 earlier this year. That Canon Pro-1 printer “died” shortly after I installed it, but only after I purchased a new set of inks. sigh. Fortunately, a buddy helped bring back to life my 17″ Epson 4800, which has limped along until just recently. Thus the pressing need for a new printer, since my gallery has just requested prints for their December exhibition.
So the new printer will not make “huge” prints, it will make larger prints.
I have the spot picked out for when it is when it is delivered, which is right next my work station. Regretfully my studio is also upstairs, so I will need to find a team of strong backs to carry this beast up the staircase.
I recall working in my darkroom and making the transition to printing 16 x 20″ silver gelatin photographs was pretty dramatic for my tiny space. Primarily one needs larger trays, much larger trays for this size paper and with my archival printing process, that meant making room for six big trays (or was it seven?), which were sized about 30 x 30″. At that time I could only dream about making a 24 x 30″ silver gelatin photographic print.
So for me, buying a 17″ wide printer was what I needed to get started in my transition to digital some fifteen years ago. And even at that time I had anticipated upscaling to a larger printer, but sometimes life gets in the way of our best made plans. That day for a larger printer has finally come and having lived through the countless nozzle jams with my Epson and hearing the many stories of other Epson printer users, I think it’s good time to change to Canon printers. Which I hear a lot of very good things about and now many of my friends have the earlier Canon Pro-2000 version and think these are wonderful printers. I guess I will soon find out, although every piece of equipment has it’s own quirks.
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The featured photograph above is my big reveal as to my intent for my project Gardening For Ordnance. This diptych is a draft study, so some design and layout tweaking yet to come, such as adding a border or frame around the narrative or the combination of the two. Essentially I want to pair up the military/government text that describes this decommissioned WWII bombing range in conjunction with the photographs of this ex-military site as it appears today.
Cheers!
Featured photograph, above; untitled, diptych (Gardening For Ordnance) 2019 copyright Douglas Stockdale
Singular Images 