Wall Art; Follow-up

A quick snapshot with my iPad showing which photographs I picked and how they are arranged on the wall of our
family room. (click to enlarge)

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about the difficulty I was having in narrowing down thousands of images to just a few to have printed as wall art.  You can find that post here.  My difficulties began with trying to single out only three images from my image catalog.  Then, to complicate the matter, one must consider how each image, for a multiple image display, relates to one another in subject matter as well as potentially its dominant colors.  Finally, one has to think what wall art will complement the existing decor in a room—if at all.

The image above is a quick iPad camera shot of the three images I picked.  I had Bay Photo in California print, mat and frame them.  They did a perfect job!  The images themselves are 12" X 16" (30cm X 40cm).  The two on either side are from Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming and were shot with a Nikon D810.  For the image on the left, the camera was tripod mounted and I attached the Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8 VR II lens. The one on the right was handheld and the lens I used was the Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8 VR.  The center image is from the Kit Carson National Forest in northern New Mexico and made with my Olympus E-M1 Mark II coupled to the 12-100mm f/4 PRO lens.  

As hung, even when looking from only a few inches away, one cannot discern a difference between them for resolution or sharpness.  In a case such as this, sensor size didn't matter.

The final difficulty I discovered in selecting images is image ratio.  The two outer images were made in a 2:3 ratio (35mm) and the center in a 4:3 (M4/3).  Since I wanted all prints to be the same size, the two outer images had to be cropped to match the ratio of the center image.  Cropping the center image to match the outer two didn't work.

Initially, I had also selected some other images as potentials for this hanging, but none could stand the crop and still look compositionally pleasing to me.  I guess that can be chocked up to me carefully composing in-camera.  Add cropping as another difficulty in final selection.

The lesson to be learned, it seems, is photograph sparingly so you don't have so many images from which to choose, photograph with only one format, photograph with only one image ratio and photograph only one type of subject.  If you do all that, selecting photos to hang on your walls should be a breeze!  Lol.

Finally, seeing my images as enlargements just brought a real smile to my face.  I don't have my images printed often, but when they do get printed, it reminds me as to why I loved to spend all that time in the darkroom those many years ago.  There is a satisfaction I get from looking at prints that looking at images on a monitor just can't duplicate.  Another lesson:  print your images occasionally.  You won't regret it.

Join me over at Instagram @dennisamook or my website, www.dennismook.com. 

Thanks for looking. Enjoy! 

Dennis A. Mook 

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