Ghosts of Packard, Writ Large

I sold a large print of one of my favorite Packard photos, above. My customer, who is the wife of a guy I work with, is buying it for her husband. She wants it big - 40 inches wide, which makes the final print 26.5x40. It's getting a 2" matte in charcoal and a custom aluminum frame in metallic light-gray. So the final piece will be about 34.5x47.

 

The picture itself is a pigment-ink print on 100% cotton rag. Very expensive print. The photo is a high resolution HDR assembled from five stacked 21MP shots. I scaled the file up using the same software they use for billboards, a state-of-the art scaler that uses fractal geometry to scale up features.

 

Right now I've got the print, the frame, and the plexi. I'm waiting on the oversize matte board to come in.

 

The photograph is stunning. It's like a world of detail, you can see every rivet in the beams of the plant, every piece of paper on the ground is near-perfectly resolved. The only artifacts are some very slight misalignment in parts because the 5 shots, although done on a tripod, are not perfectly the same. But this is being picky, you'd never notice it if I didn't point it out.

 

Cotton rag pigment prints are the best prints there are. The rag surface is completely matte, the detail is breathtaking. And the pigments are designed to last 200 years. Everything is acid-free and museum quality.

 

I took the print and frame into a local art store, the only place in the city capable of getting oversize matte boards in a timely manner (they are 40x60 and so UPS won't ship them, the have to be delivered).

 

The framer at the art shop was a character. As soon as I uncovered the picture on the counter she gasped. I thought she had stepped on a tack or something. She looked up at me and said

 

"Oh. My. God. This is one of the most dramatic photographs I've ever seen. And I've been framing photographs for 30 years."

 

Wow, I thought. That's a nice compliment. And it turned out she is indeed very knowledgeable about photographs, and even about UrbEx. She asked me where the photo was taken and her next question was

 

"Is that the place they found the Banksy piece?"

 

"Two", I said.

 

Her eyes just about popped out of her head. I was amazed she knew about Banksy.

 

She really made me feel good about my work. I mean it's one thing to get a compliment from a friend or family member, but it's a different thing to get one from someone who knows photography so well. She had a great eye for color too, she guessed just about exactly what I did with the color in the photo and helped me pick out a perfect matte color. She was versed in the finer points of astronomical photography and listed the similarities between their process, called "stacking" and what we Earthly photographers call HDR.

 

She highly suggested I get a booth at an art fair and also get my photos in a show or two. UrbEx is hot right now and she said I'm one of the best at it she's seen. Wow. Yay for me. Lol.