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Printing For Profit in Platinum From Digital Negatives - The Concise Guide - Part 7/7

Part 7/7 - Selling platinum prints and final words.

Selling platinum prints.

If you are not interested in this section consider yourself lucky, because this is by far the most difficult part of the entire "process". Assuming that you are all set up to sell, meaning you have the skills, a portfolio, the equipment, the materials to print, mount and frame and so on, there are basically two choices, selling online or selling in the real world. The former gives us another three sub-choices: selling on eBay or/and through our own web site or/and other online galleries.

Selling on eBay has proved for me successful, but it is a hard job that requires dedication. (There are other auction sites of course but they can not compete with eBay). eBay's advantage is its great visibility, which I have found useful also to meet many other fellow artists and photographers and share experience, prints etc. Unfortunately it is a low price market, and if you want to be seen among thousands of listings you must invest some money. eBay and Paypal fees combined are extremely high. To make things worse, if you plan to start selling from zero (i.e. with no feedback and unknown) and at a decent price, say $100+ per print, you can be quite sure that no one is likely to buy your work. You may want to try, if you can, with nudes, which is a genre that works certainly better than landscapes (on the entire internet not only on eBay of course). If you are seeking gallery representation you may hope that you will be noticed on eBay but in my experience it is unlikely. As said in the first part, the good news is that if you bite the bullet and start offering your work at a low price you will make some sales, you will be able to print and learn etc., and slowly be able to raise your price. This does not mean that one has to compromise his/her integrity, for I have seen more that one talented photographer selling palladium prints at as little as $15, which I disagree with. As said in Part 1 a good selling point is editioning your work. I have several images in my portfolio which are now sold out, but the image must be really outstanding. Until 2005/2006 the photographs category on eBay was quite an exciting place, with many talented artists and several keen collectors. Since then, as eBay is getting worse, especially for sellers, so is the photography category.

Selling through a web site, either yours or other online galleries, such as Artbyus etc. is another way. In my experience, proposing a specific work (maybe a niche such as landscapes or architectural photos etc) and advertising with Google Adwords (and on collectors' magazines such as B&W Magazine at the same time) has proved successful but of course it requires financial exposure. Ironically, I sell from my web sites at a higher price than eBay, and despite having obviously no feedback on my web site, people are willing to pay more. Well obviously on your own site you have no competition, but it is also true that sales happen more frequently on eBay. The two magic words on the internet are niches and keywords. Just try to do something very specific and push it with the correct tools (you need to be a bit of an internet geek to sell online) and you will probably be successful. Proposing you work with a more generic approach is more likely to be a failure. If starting to print in platinum is for you a breakthrough, it obviously does not mean that you are the only one doing it.

A third approach that has been working for me well is printing for others. There are many out there willing to pay to have their important memories well printed and presented with the advantage of the long permanency. In this type of business (which has the added advantage that you can see other artists' work, which is refreshing and inspiring) you may be lucky and find the big customer, i.e. art galleries or corporate in general. I started this service not long ago, and I have been lucky to meet an important art gallery as well as a few famous photographers. I have one price for the first print, which requires of course making a negative, and a slightly lower price for additional copies from the same negative. I generally give a bit of my personal interpretation to the image (well sometimes to the point of even cropping it) unless the client is rigid. If the job is big (i.e. gallery) I have a third price for proofs, for they usually want to see different versions of the same image, maybe on different papers etc. Of course, if you want to succeed as an artist, that is, with your own work only, this is not the way to go, but this book is also about selling pt-pd prints for profit and I think this method works.

Final choice, as said, is selling in the real world. This is entirely up to you because it depends on the circumstances, finances etc. Personally I have a small studio/gallery where I can show my work upon appointment. In the past I have been busy with local exhibitions but I find these an annoyance because making and framing say 25 images and selling maybe ten leaves you with 15 unsold, framed, numbered prints (often scratched or damaged from transit), which is a waste of money. Also frustrating the fact that many people do not know anything about hand crafting a fine print in platinum, and comments such as nice photo, is that an ink-jet? are not rare.

Proposing your work to art galleries is a different matter altogether and probably the best way to go, of course seeking and obtaining gallery representation goes beyond the scope of these articles.


Final words.

Printing in platinum is very rewarding and all it needs is to be consistent with the process and careful when mixing and handling chemicals. The cost is easy to keep under control, and similar to printing digitally (ink-jet inks and papers are extremely expensive plus the cost of a professional printer, software etc.).

You will not become a master printmaker overnight, however, the difficulty is not in the technique, which is relatively easy to master, it is in you whether you will be able or not to critically assess your own prints. This can be improved viewing work from others, visiting art galleries or trading pt-pd prints with other photographers, and developing your own artistic vision. The second issue is purely financial. If you manage to sell your work, you can make enough money to try different techniques and experiment with different papers, double coating, different mixtures etc.

Making fine art images will also teach you conservation mounting and framing, editioning and, for those interested, custom printing for other fellow photographers and artists, further enhancing your skills. I find my own experience in platinum so far extremely satisfying and I wish the same for you. Feel free to let me know what you think of these articles and in case of problems or doubts please do not hesitate to contact me through my web site.

About the Author

Luca Paradisi has been an internationally collected artist and fine art printmaker for many years. For more fine art photography inspiration you can visit his web site at artblackandwhite.com where he shows his work which includes landscapes, still life, abstracts, and architectural.

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Portrait Photography

Anyone can take a portrait photograph, regardless of experience or training due to the often overwhelming advancements in digital photography and the many tools and accessories that come today's digital cameras. Simply point and shoot, it's really that easy. Not so long ago, if someone needed a photographic portrait, there were many more time and money intensive steps that one needed to take to create one. The rapid evolution of digital technology has made those steps obsolete and made portrait photography virtually painless.

While there are many different kinds of photography, portrait photography describes the process of capturing the image of a person or group of people, while generally focusing on their face and expressions. This is a key distinction, even though many portraits include the rest of the body and background images. The focus, however, is always on the subject's face and facial expressions. There are many different kinds of portrait shots, too. A candid shot, one where the subject is not posed and often taken while they are not paying attention, is very different than a body shot which is very deliberately posed to instill a particular emotion or reaction from the photo. Portraits always have a specific point of view, and the photographer uses body language, the position of the gaze and various poses and backgrounds to bring their internal vision of the shot to life.

Portrait photography has been around nearly as long as photography itself. Even so, it was only a treat for the very rich, as it was a very expensive luxury to procure. Before photography, painters and artists spent huge amounts of time, carefully creating portraits of their affluent clients using oil paint, water colors, charcoal and even marble and other types of stone in sculptures. You might be able imagine how much time and thought went into these masterpieces. Even with the amount of time that went into completing early portraits, the artists were experts and while not easy, they produced their masterpieces in a reasonable amount of time.

As we evolved and then our technology evolved, methods of creating portraits were developed that didn't involve the time an effort original portraits took. The Camera Lucida, which was a popular trend where silhouettes were painted in miniature became popular. These were relatively quick to produce, but even so, were no match for even the earliest forms of photography. In the beginning, much like the industry competition today, there were different kinds of processes in photography. Daguerreotype, developed in France by Louis Daguerre in the early 1800's and Calotype invented in the mid 1800's in the US by William Henry Talbot are two of the most popular processes at the time.

Louis Daguerre and Sir Joseph Niepce two giants in the history of photography partnered to improve their process. The work that they accomplished made the Daguerreotype the most popular photographic process for portrait photos. The fierce competition caused wonderful evolution in the field of portrait photography. Today, portrait photography is definitely less expensive than the traditional portraiture of the past. As with many art forms, traditional portrait artists exist today, and you can still enjoy handcrafted portraits of the past even today.

Portraits themselves and not just the way they've been captured has changed over time. In the beginning, portraits captured the image of an individual, then came family or group portraits, then special occasions like weddings and events and now all manner of these things is captured using modern photography. Seen as magic in the beginning, we now know that photographic portraiture owes its magical results to science. In its infancy the lighting, background and subject had to be staged perfectly to successfully capture the perfect portrait. Today, the evolution of digital technology and photography is such that the modern day photographer can take their equipment anywhere the subject takes them.

Lighting, always an important element in all art forms, but even more so in portrait photography, has also evolved alongside the rest of technology. Standard methods for lighting portraits have been long established, making even novice photographers look like pros. The three-point lighting setup is one of them and uses three basic lighting points: key light, fill light and hair light. This particular lighting setup requires a studio to properly control all three of these particular lighting elements. The success of this particular setup is the wonderful shadows that the photographer can control as a result of the three light sources. Carefully controlled shadows are the secret to great portraits. The photographer can highlight the subjects features using these shadows. One, direct source of light would never be able to manage the depth of expression that three can.

Advancements and fierce competition among digital camera and accessories manufactures continues causing the industry to become ever more complex and paradoxically ever more simple as it evolves. With today's equipment the average photographer can change color and lighting simply by choosing different digital camera attachments. One can even take a shot as is, then change those elements and many more on their computer using digital editing software. The final image can be edited so much it may not even resemble the original subject. Isn't technology a wondrous thing?

About the Author

Learn more about our portrait photography services at these pages: child photographer long island, long island photographers, portrait photography long island.

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