High Quality Digital Photographic Printing at Home
Monday, April 23, 2007
K&S in Palo Alto recommended the following two places for local framing needs:
University Art: Palo Alto Store www.universityart.com
267 Hamilton Ave, Palo Alto, 94301 - (650) 328-3500
Accent Arts
www.accentarts.com392 S California Ave
Palo Alto, CA 94306
(650) 424-1044
Palo Alto, CA 94306
Of these two places, University Art got really good reviews, and Accent Arts got terrible
reviews. Thus, even though AA quoted me lower prices for dry mounting than UA did,
I am going with University Arts.
University Art recommended (by phone) Jungle Digital Imaging on High Street in Palo Alto for printing needs.
Dale Cotton's Framing tutorial lists the following two methods of attaching the print to the backboard, of which only the first has the property of covering the full area of the print:
3M Photo Mount Spray Adhesive
3M Photo & Document Mending tape
I believe the full area needs to be used, because otherwise, with time, the print will start
to bend. This is likely to be true especially in my case, since I plan to not use matting. I am considering using this as an alternative to dry-mounting.
Thursday, April 19, 2007
The plan is to hang 23 photographs around the house, most printed in pretty large size. After a lot of thinking, I decided to dry mount, frame, but not matte them, and present naked (no glass). Matte is mostly needed to keep the glass separated from he photograph, and I would rather have the photographs take up extra space (by being larger) than have the matte eat it up. Also, this will save costs. I don't see how to avoid dry-mounting or framing.
After a visit to Zyt Gallery on San Antonio in Los Altos, my wife and I decided to order the frames on the internet -- Zyt Gallery quoted us absolutely exuberant prices. It looks like PictureFrames.com is going to be place the order them. Their web site has width and rabbet size for each frame, but, alas, no lip size (the part of the frame that intrudes on the photograph). A phone conversation with them revealed that the majority of their frames have 1/4" lip (on each side). This means that if you were to order a 10"x8" frame from them, its opening would actually be 9.5"x7.5" (since 1/4" x 2 would be taken from each dimension). They also specify dimensional tolerance at 1/8". Initially, I was planning to play with the numbers and to have the lip of the frame eat up less of the space of the photograph. But, given the size I am going to print at, 1/4" eaten on each side should not be a big deal, whereas the peace of mind that nothing but the photograph will be visible is important to me. Ergo -- I will do exactly what they suggested, and order the frames sized exactly by the size of the "picture" in the photograph, i.e., the printed portion, and ignore the white border portion. Further, I will instruct the dry-mounting place to cut off all of the white border before mounting. In fact, just to be safe, it may be a good idea to get the dry-mounted prints back before ordering the frames, so that the measurements communicated to the frame shop are the exact measurements of the dry-mounted and cut photographs.
Next task -- finding a place to inexpensively dry-mount and count 23 large size photographs.
