Printed Portfolios

I was talking to a fellow photographer a few months back about printing. In order to illustrate a point I grabbed one of my printed portfolios from off the shelf.

Six years worth of portfolios sitting on my shelf

The point was instantly forgotten as he looked through the portfolios and exclaimed "what a simple and obvious idea". He immediately resolved to start printing out his images and saving them in portfolios. It's such an obvious idea that I thought I would share it with you, dear reader.

Landscape images fit just as well as portrait, though it helps if you turn the book round

I print each image on premium gloss paper at A4. In Qimage I have set up a job that sizes them, adds a small Key-line round the edge of each image and uses the IPTC metadata to print a caption at the bottom right of each page.
The process is really quite simple: Every six months (yes there is a reminder on RTM), I pick a set of images from my archive in iView Media Pro and create a catalog set. I then send the entire lot to the QImage queue and hit the print button.

A print is so much more satisfying to look at then a screen

I store my images in A4 Panodia Prinitbooks, which seem to be getting quite hard to come by. You can buy the book on its own as well as a refil pack, I find one refil pack split between two books is ideal.

It's an interesting lesson to look back at old portfolios, to see now you have developed and progressed in both technique and style.