No, I will not apologize, I will not go into details why and when and where, I will not try to explain.
Just accept it, I was AWOL and I’m showing signs of life again.
I just wanted to show some photos I took on a recent trip to Porto in Portugal. And I want to tell you that printing your photos is very important in order to be able to really appreciate them. Everything is fine on screen, sure, but you get the real kick out of them when you hold a print in hand.
No need to have the best printer costing over 500€ or more. Just make sure you have one with as many separate color cartridges as possible to get decent quality and not having to ditch a 3-color cartridge when you run out of one color.
And if possible, use an A3 printer! A4 is OK but really holding a big A3 print (or even better A3+) is the real deal.
Of course, printing is expensive, and more so if you use the original manufacturer’s inks which I recommend. I used cheap Amazon ink for a time and went back to the original ones…. what a difference! Might be I bought crappy stuff. and tere’s better cheap inks around but I won’t risk it any more.
And then again yoou can send out your photos to get them printed professionnaly. Another option that’s great. Anyways, I have no aspirations to become a professional fine art printer. Herven’t got the time and money for that, but my printer, a humble Canon Pixma iX6850 delivers prints that are perfectly good in my opinion.
Store them, display them but abone all, look through them form time to time and you’ll get even more joy aout of your photos!
See you soon again!
Frank Lehnen Photography 
Nice to see you again Frank after all this time and to know that you still have a camera 😉
I agree with you about printing, there’s nothing like a good print to hold in the hand.
I recently got a Epson XP-235 inkjet going again after it’s nozzles got blocked through non-use over the hot summer. Just an inexpensive printer but it does the job. Actually I originally found the printer in a skip (probably chucked because it won’t work over wi-fi), so risked running isopropryl through the nozzles and that worked. The only 3rd party inks I’ve tried have been fine from a supplier over here and cost just under £10 for a set of four, but their size means they don’t last long. Have been considering investing in a set of chipless cartridges and some ink refills bottles. On the other hand Epson now make a range of tank printers that are cheap to run. But I’ll be trying the chipless cartridges and refill bottles first as that’s the cheaper option.
That’s just for home use though.
Moving forward I’m having printing done professionally now as it seems a gross injustice to one’s work not to do so. Apart from when I make my own enlargements. As a test I recently had a digital pic professionally printed onto silver gelatin. 8 x 10″, quality was really quite outstanding. Picture came from a 3 megapixel digital camera.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks Kevin! Nice to be here again.
I’ll Sion reveal some really big changes in my life, that will impact my photography. Still wondering about how I’ll manage in the end. But there might be invaluable input from the community.
LikeLike
Hi Frak, nice to read your ideas again. A month ago my son damaged extrnal hard drive with 10 or 15 years of photos. Not many of them printed. Maybe 0,5 %. Waiting for news from specialists if they save them. Voting for prints!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Sad to hear about the hard Drive! Some think that’s even more important than prints is backups… but hindsight is always 10/10. Hope they can recover everything!
LikeLike
Hi Frank, good to see you back again.
Printed some of my images from a trip to the other side of the planet up to 120×80 and these look awesome.
Love your photos from Oporto, one of my favorite cities here in Good Old Europe.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hi Frank, Good to see you back. Some lovely colours in your photo’s. Me & my Mrs keep saying we want an A3+ printer and your post has inspired me to start looking again. Cheers…. 👍
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hi Frank, good to hear from you again. I don’t print very much of my work as I don’t consider it good enough. Maybe that will change one day, who knows. I have a Canon printer too which, ironically I bought to print photos as well as docs. C’est la vie! Some nice shots from Portugal. One day I’ll get into Europe again!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hi Frank!
What a nice surprise to see another post, and some wonderful photos. Amazing colors!
Much of the wall space in our new little home is devoted to my mother’s paintings, but I do have a few of my prints matted and framed on the walls. I have an archival box of my best prints in the living room and I leave two or three of my most recent prints matted but unframed on the coffee table when we have guests. A good conversation starter.
A big photographic project during lockdowns was printing scans of my father’s old 35mm nitrate film negatives. In our last move I lost my fire safe storage facility so I scanned all the negatives and tearfully handed them over to the fire marshal for safe disposal. It meant that I no longer had a physical backup of the images, so I began making letter size record prints.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Don’t care that you were gone, just glad to see you back.
LikeLiked by 1 person