Different Ways to Display Your Photography

I am going to let you guys in on one of my favorite ways to show off my photographs. Being that we have a photography studio and Fuji 370 professional printers, it is a little easier for us to play around with the images that come into the studio. My favorite thing to to with photographs is print them in different sizes other than the traditional 11x14, 8x10, 5x7, 4x6 and wallets. I have customers come in all the time and ask for different ideas on how to show off their new beach portraits. Well here it is. My favorite thing to do with images is print them in a square format. Take an 11x14 and make it a 12x12 or an 8x10 and make it a 10x10 or an 8x8, 5x7 looks interesting as a 5x5. Now, how do we do this? When you take your images to the local drug store or discount warehouse stores, you stick your card in and you are given the traditional options. Next time, before you just stick that card in and say print, do a little post production work. Any basic photo editing software will do. Be sure when you take your pictures, if you are planning on cropping to these unusual sizes, you leave plenty of border around your subject. Next bring the image into your software and crop it to the desired size. Next open up a new document and size it to the closest traditional size such as an 8x10 if you are wanting and 8x8 result.. Now you have two documents open, the original image(cropped to 8x8) and the new document(sized to 8x10). Take the original image and either drag and drop it or copy and paste it into the new document. Now you have an 8x8 image on an 8x10 document. Remember to make sure the dpi or resolution of both documents are the same. For example if you original photo is 72dpi then your new document needs to be the same resolution. I suggest 300 dpi for printing. Now that you have saved all of the images you want into the new documents and named them appropriately, save them on a disk, memory stick or cd and take them for printing. It would be a good idea to purchase a professional photo trimmer, prices range from around $20 up to hundreds of dollars. You can also purchase frames in these sizes or have them made at your local craft store. Now you have it, the big secret to odd sized prints.