Important Information About Fine Prints

 

June 7, 2025 

1) These are technologically mature, ultra-high quality inkjet prints on the finest matte paper I've ever seen. I can also, by special arrangement, make prints on equally fine, glossy inkjet papers. I no longer use RC papers except for special circumstances where lamination is required, rather I only use the best, and very costly, state of the art European papers from a major papermaking company which is over four centuries old. These matte prints are more brilliant than has been possible until recently, with blacker blacks and brighter white both. This allowed me to finally enjoy the various benefits of matte surface papers without sacrificing overall brilliance under typical illumination. 

2) My Framing Options document explains at length what we can do about getting your print framed to your satisfaction. I recommend taking the time to read it and understand it. 

3) The matting and framing mockups shown here in the Purchase pane are necessarily not exactly to scale! The more panoramic images are shown with overly large mat borders, for example. Please take careful note of the dimensions supplied in the descriptions. Upon request, I can supply you with a drawing for your framer with my suggested matting dimensions, should you purchase an unmounted print. 

4) Note that the simulations shown here are necessarily unable to show the effects of having glazing over the photograph, which causes varying degrees of interference with seeing the image. Both the placement of the print and the choice of glazing matter, but now is the time to think about this and plan the choice of optimal glazing, for best result when the piece is on your wall. 

My default glazing is Acrylite Gallery UV-filtering (OP3) acrylic sheet. It has the same reflectance properties as a sheet of plain glass. A beautiful but expensive upgrade to UV-filtering and anti-reflection coated Tru Vue Optium Museum Acrylic is now also shown as an option right here on my site.  Please see these two web pages for detailed into on each glazing option: 

https://www.acrylite.co/products/our-brands/acrylite-gallery/uv-filtering 

https://tru-vue.com/solution/optium-museum-acrylic/ 

5) I make these prints to order myself and making them is still quite time consuming, so I am unable to guarantee a quick delivery. I will do my best to get your print made and shipped in a reasonable period, but I will require your patience.  Should you have an urgent deadline, please let me know and I’ll do my best to take that into account. It is likely to take several weeks and can take considerably longer, depending on how busy I am with other things. Please click the Arrange Order button to initiate a brief, pre-order discussion by email. 

6) Orders from outside the 50 states of the U.S. will be limited to unmounted, rolled prints because overseas shipments of flat art are prohibitively expensive. 

7) My preferred medium is now a very fine, smooth, 100% cotton, matte paper, using a superb, pigment inkset. This Epson UltraChrome HDX 10-color inkset allows for more brilliant results on matte paper and tremendously improved display longevity, by virtue of having improved the matte black ink and cut the fading of the prior yellow pigment by more than a factor of two. One of the two leading image permanence experts in the world told me that these prints may outlast a van Gogh on display by as much as several times, given the fragility of Vincent’s red pigments. I'm not assuming it will be that good, but the resistance to fading will almost certainly be on the order of 100 times greater than that of a typical 4-color poster, which you may have seen turn bluish and pale over perhaps a decade or two indoors from loss of yellow and magenta pigments in the ink. It’s very likely that my current prints will look quite beautiful on indoor display for a few centuries under average light levels, but as light levels on indoor display vary a great deal, a projected lifespan must take them into account to be approximately correct. The B&W prints should do substantially better still, because they contain no yellow ink at all and only a very little bit of magenta and cyan to achieve the ideal tint with great precision — the vast majority of their pigment is carbon which doesn't fade at all. 

These prints, whether color or B&W, are still quite physically fragile, should always be handled with great care and must be framed with glazing and the framing job done well, but in such cases, if not repeatedly exposed to full sun coming through a window, all of my prints of these types should endure for many generations to come and rival oil paintings in this regard. Thus color photographs can now enjoy a sound basis for being highly valued as works of art, without the historical shortcomings of the medium, aside from the mere facts of being both fragile and capable of being printed more than once. They can even be more durable overall than B&W silver-gelatin photographic prints, in particular because of their improved immunity to high and low relative humidities, to which traditional prints are quite sensitive. Of course that comparison depends on the conditions at the location or locations where the piece will be displayed, but many parts of the U.S., for example, get too wet or too dry for gelatin emulsions to survive undamaged, such as much of the east in winter, or the Mississippi Valley eastward in summer, Hawaii or Florida for most of the year, and so on. Naturally, if a building is reliably climate-controlled, a print will do fine anywhere, but this is not something I can take for granted.  Silver gelatin “traditional” B&W photographic prints should be kept at between 35 and 60% rH to avoid trouble.  These inkjet prints, mostly made of a high grade of pure alpha cellulose cotton and devoid of reactive silver lack the rH sensitivity of gelatin emulsions entirely.  I don’t know what a safe lower or upper limit for rH will prove to be for them, but the main issue would likely be the mere expansion and contraction of the paper in response to widely varying rH. 

Using a moisture-proof layer on the back side of the print as part of the framing solution is very important because together with the glazing over the front it can greatly stabilize the moisture content of the print and any matboard used for the overmat or backing, thus dramatically improving the response of the print and overmat to changes in ambient relative humidity. Aluminum composite material (Dibond or e-panel), heavy-duty aluminum foil (can be taped together from common roll material with a high-quality, acrylic-adhesive tape), various plastic sheet materials (rigid acrylic sheet, flexible polyethelene materials of various types), and PVC closed-cell foam materials (e.g. Sintra) can all accomplish this. Closed-cell styrene foam materials are not waterproof enough (FomeCor, Archival FomeCor, Gatorboard). Paper, cardboard and mat board are not moisture proof at all. 

The printing paper is the most beautiful paper surface for printing on that I've ever seen, with a subtle but lovely texture which doesn't interfere with the image at all but which does betray its fine cotton pedigree. The color of the white itself is simply superb and a major breakthrough in the development of papers for photographic printmaking, with precisely the ideal, very subtle bit of warmth and very high brightness — with no optical brighteners whatsoever. My signature is done in pencil in the print margin and is arguably the primary way in which a fine photographic print can be deemed to be an original. Each print is given two numbers on each of the two certificates which I make for it. One goes on the back of the mount and the other on the back of the finished, framed print, should the framing cover up the first. Each certificate tells which number the print is in this medium (e.g. pigment inkjet) and which number the print is in this approximate size in this medium. Here are two sample certificates for this medium. 

As for the concept of edition limits: I find most uses of the term "limited edition" in photography to be nonsensical. No print made by the photographer can be anything but limited in number, and most exist (and will always exist) in far fewer numbers than most edition limits would imply. At the same time, small, fixed edition sizes, chosen when an image is first offered, do serve very well to shoot both the artist and the public in the foot when a particular image turns out to be among the most popular. It's a more useful approach to issue a number for each print in a given edition, which I define by medium, such as pigment inkjet. I also add a number which tells how many prints have been made in the size of the print in question. For example a print might be the 6th pigment inkjet print of a given image, but the first one in its particular size. In fact, I don't have the time to make very many prints each year, so my prints are all quite "limited" with respect to their numbers. You will be hard-pressed to find any photographer who puts more effort into the making of one print than I do, and after a half century of working at this, my skill's pretty good too. 

8) All of my prints contain my logo, usually in the lower right corner, but sometimes elsewhere near the bottom of the image as necessitated by image content. In every case I have carefully adjusted its size, color and tone so as to complement the image well. In some cases, newer images on the site are shown without the logo, only because I've not yet done the considerable job of adding it. I was inspired many years ago to add this unique touch by the chop found in the work of Japanese painters as well as by the conventional practice of European painters who sign in the image itself.