[shuttertalk]

Hey all, just thinking back to the film days - when you had to physically print each roll and you ended up with albums and albums of prints. These days, with digital I seem to keep taking more and more photos but hardly any ever make it into print format. If there's one observation I would make, personally, home printing for me is all but dead. Instead, my wife or I periodically upload some photos to be printed at the shop and we physically pick them up at the lab. More and more, we've been relying on photo books, canvas prints and those sort of display centrepieces to showcase our photos.

How about you? What have you noticed about your printing habits? Are prints still important to you? How much of your work gets printed? Do you still print at home, or just do it at the shop? What sort of media do you end up printing on?

[Toad]

I print really only for presentation or for portfolio stuff - hardly ever for other reasons. I also have rows of albums from the film days.

[Don Schaeffer]

My son recently said he wanted more prints. He's a kind of historian. He needs things to be archived, recalls the days when he could shuffle through albums and boxes of old snapshots and see the people and settings. Prints will always have their place because we can't trust the techjnology to last. Our old digital archives may not be viewable in 10 years.

In my own case, I print very little (that's what made him remark as he did). I tend to print a photo in rough form then make a painting from it. The internet is my primary storage and display medium. That means all my images will certainly vanish in short order, but at least they get seen.

[Toad]

My son recently said he wanted more prints. He's a kind of historian. He needs things to be archived, recalls the days when he could shuffle through albums and boxes of old snapshots and see the people and settings. Prints will always have their place because we can't trust the techjnology to last.

You could equally well make the point that prints and negatives are far more subject to being lost forever than digital images. There is usually only one copy of a print and most of the time it are stored at the same place as the negative. Physical loss or destruction seems far more likely than being stored on the internet.

[EnglishBob]

I print 11*17 for competition prints (around 30 per year). The only other stuff I print is for sending out in Christmas cards each year, I send a selection of vacation pictures to family back in England.

My Wife tends to take pictures on vacations and events (parties etc) and she uploads to the local Costco and will print 200 images 3-4 times per year, she likes to have physical prints and does have albums of them!

[matthew]

I print at home, but typically no larger than letter size even though my printer does 13x19. About ten times a year I gather with a group of friends at a coffee shop for a casual critique session, and I'll do the printing for most of the group. It works out to about 20-25 images, not counting some proofs. But my own images simply for my own enjoyment? Almost never.

[NT73]

My wife prints calendars for friends at Christmas. We use a mixture of our digital images, and last year we tried canvas type printing paper.
As they are christmas presents, no one complains so we must be doing it right.
We decide a theme each year, last year being birds. The year before China, etc.
She sets up the basic calendar and borders around the photo, the whole thing being on A4. Holes at the top locate the clips and bindings.
Basics from Broderbund Printshop 2 for Mac.
This year I may try glueing photos on to the page rather than printing as a trial.
As for putting them in albums I have a cupboard full of albums Around 30+ :| plus a very large collection of 35mm slides slowly going to digital.

[Wedding Shooter]

I print heaps of my client's stuff at home - hardly any of my own. Then again I hardly have time for my own work these days

[NT73]

Wait till you retire, and then you will wonder how you made time for work.