First photo printed on my new printer
Quote of the day: “All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
I got a new printer last week. It’s an Epson Stylus Pro 3880 — a big step up from my little old (but very productive and useful) Epson Stylus Photo R300 printer. My new printer can print photos up to 17 inches wide and has archival quality ink.
While many friends and clients were surprised by the quality of photos my old printer produced, I was feeling the limitations more and more. It could only handle up to 8 1/2″ wide sheets of paper, and the ink was dye-based, not archival quality. I’ve been wanting to make larger prints more frequently and found that I want complete control of the process that printing my own photographs gives me.
I tried several different online and local photo printing services, but sadly, the colors were good on some of my prints and awful on others. Just when I thought I had the color profile down, I would send in a different sort of print and be highly disappointed with the results. On the first order I received in my Etsy store (opened in September 2011), I sent the digital files to a local photo processor for printing (where I had done several test prints that had turned out exactly as I wanted) and was totally disappointed with the results. The prints were unusable. So, I sat down and printed them on my own printer getting exactly the results I had envisioned.
In the Fine Art Printing workshop I took several weeks ago, our instructor, John Gregor of Coldsnap Photography (http://coldsnap.com/), said that in most cases it is important to perform at least one proofing print for every photograph you print. Often you need to make adjustments and do multiple proofing prints before you are satisfied with the results. When I began to understand how the human eye sees color, versus the colors available in various color spaces, versus the color space on the printer I realized how true his advice was. Because of differences in exposure, mood, color, light, paper, etc., color profiles will not work for every single print you want to make. While color profiles have improved greatly from the early days, they still will not work for every photograph. I highly recommend John Gregor’s The Fine Art Print workshop to anyone wanting a strong technical basis for understanding fine art printing.
Ok, back to my new printer. Here it is before I removed all of the shipping tape:
My new Epson Stylus 3880 printer
It doesn’t look so big in this photo, but compared to my old printer, it’s big! Before we could set up the new printer I had to find space for it! Not such an easy task in my little 10×10 office/meditation room/exercise space. I wish had had the forethought to take before pictures so you could see my office before I re-arranged everything (duh!). I only grabbed my camera when the rearrangement was well underway, so I can’t show you the cozy, cluttered way it used to look.
Yesterday, I moved my meditation chair into the master bedroom. (Actually this was a good thing. Since I’ve been working more and more hours in this room, my mind goes into work mode when I enter the room, not meditation mode.) Then Jon, my sweet and ever-lovin’ husband, did most of the rest of the heavy lifting and moving (twice, since he had a better idea today than yesterday, so he moved everything around again).
First go round –We moved my desk in front of the window and added a table to the left for the printers. Hmmmm… not quite right
I didn’t like blocking my window view with the computer and desk “stuff,” and when Jon moved in a second table we both found the setup of the room wasn’t working. So one more try…
Now my desk is on the side wall where I can look to the right and see the lovely view out the front window. I’ve got room to work at my desk, both printers handy beside my desk and I have another table for matting and framing photos.
So that’s how my office is set up now and so far I like it a lot. Now to work more on the wall and window decor and figure out better storage organization in the closet.
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