The first of these is a new site I’ve set up in partnership with the folks at Canvas Press Pro or, more precisely, their “Really Big Canvas” division. This site hosts the “Altered Perspectives” collection, a couple of dozen of my favourite images offered for sale as large, high quality canvas prints in sizes ranging from 24″ to 72″. The collection contains both standard aspect ratio images and stitched panoramas. Each image is sold as a limited edition of 200 prints but we’ll be adding new images to the collection over time.

I have several large canvas prints hanging in the house and have sold quite a few to clients this year so can attest to the fact that they look absolutely spectacular! (not that I’m even vaguely biased, of course ☺)

If you follow my photoblog, you’ll no doubt know that I enjoy using ultra wide angle lenses and otherwise mucking with the way I portray my subjects so the name “Altered Perspectives” seemed rather appropriate for the collection. Take a look and let me know what you think. Also, if there are any of my images that you think are missing, let me know and I’ll make sure they are in the queue for the next update.

The second project I’m working on should prove even more fun for me, I suspect, but will likely also involve a lot more work. I was invited to join the team at Austin’s latest travel magazine, “TravelHost Austin”, and will be providing images for each of the magazine’s 4 issues per year. TravelHost is a well-established brand around the country but the first issue of the Austin publication will be out within the next couple of weeks and will be found in every hotel room and concierge desk in the city. Look for an editorial talking about my photography in the first issue and my shots illustrating an article on Thirsty Planet Brewery (I seem to be doing a lot of booze-related shoots for them and I keep bumping into the publisher in pubs for some reason!).

So – exciting times for me but, with the design of the Altered Perspectives site finished, I should be able to get back to posting here a bit more frequently over the next few months.

I’ve been a fan of Michael’s photography for several years and have been in awe at how he manages to cure the problems associated with mixed tungsten/daylight white balance. In the show, he drops several great tips on how he gets round this and other problems associated with shooting interiors in the middle of the day. Check it out either on the PhotoNetCast site or from iTunes.

It’s great to find that people appreciate your work but even better when the person paying the compliment is a photographer whose work you already very much enjoy. Younes is an Ottawa-based travel and landscape photographer. You can find his portfolio here and his blog here. Both are definitely worth a look.

While I’m writing, I should apologise for the fact that this blog has been rather quiet lately. I’m still posting to my photoblog daily but time that I would otherwise spend working on a couple of tutorials I have planned for here has been diverted to organising two new workshops (one for beginners in late February and another HDR class in March) and setting things up for an exciting project that will be seeing the light of day some time at the end of this month. Once these are done, I promise I’ll give this site a bit more attention than it has had for the last few months!

For a change, I’ve posted my “Best of 2011″ post over on the photoblog. Head on over if you would like to take a look at the 10 pictures I consider to be my favourites this year.

How do you fancy the chance to win one of 6 20″x30″ prints from photographers Colby Brown, Elia Locardi, Jay Patel, Varina Patel, Ken Kaminesky and Alexander Safonov?

These fine people have teamed up with “The Giving Lens” to try to raise some money for kids in Nicaragua. For every $10 you donate to Empowerment International, you get a chance to win one of the prints. Why not head on over and spread the Christmas cheer while standing a chance to win a gorgeous print worth around $500?

Photowalks in Austin are a bit like buses. You wait around for one for ages then, all of a sudden, two arrive at the same time! Thankfully, although there are two photowalks happening next Saturday, they have been cunningly (or, more likely, luckily) arranged such that you can attend both if you have the stamina.

At 5pm, a group of us are gathering on the south steps of the Capitol building to shoot it at twilight and hopefully get a few better shots than this one. We’ll concentrate on the exterior and work our way north from there up Congress Avenue towards the Bob Bullock State History Museum and the Blanton Museum of Art. Not that I’m being selfish but there’s a particular dusk shot I want to get from the front of the Blanton Museum so, since I’m organising this one, that’s where we’ll end up.

This particular walk is intended to allow Colorado visitor Justin Balog (from the “Light as Magic” photoblog) to meet some of us Austin photobloggers so come along and say hello.

Later that evening, Trey Ratcliff and Lotus Carroll are organising another walk with a totally different focus. At 8pm, people will be meeting on 37th Street to shoot the famous Christmas decorations up there. I suspect that will be an altogether less intimate walk (100 people or so?) but a great deal of fun too. To sign up for that one, click here. I see the attendee list already includes local buddies like Alex Suarez, Mike Tuuk, Peter Tsai and Jack “photojack” Hollingsworth so we are definitely in for a spirited evening of conversation and photography.

I’ve ordered quite a few prints from ImageKind myself over the years and their quality is fabulous. I use them for large paper prints mostly and have received gorgeous prints up to 50 inches in the past. One advantage they offer over other printing suppliers is that they also offer matting and framing service at a very reasonable cost so you can order your art from them and hang it immediately when it arrives.

It seems to have become traditional that I shoot family pictures on Thanksgiving Day. Usually this means that I take the camera and various lighting bits-and-pieces to wherever the family is gathering for lunch and take pictures of various people there. This goes down well with the extended family but typically means that I don’t end up with a picture of my immediate family. This year, however, we changed the pattern.

On Thanksgiving morning, before heading off to sister-in-law Thanh’s for lunch, I set up a light in front of one of the oaks on our driveway and shot various pictures of the four of us. I had shot some other pics of a friend’s family earlier in the week and Nikki reckoned it would be nice to have a group shot for our Christmas card too. Here’s the one we chose – I’m pretty happy with it.

For the technically inclined, it was shot with the 24-70mm f/2.8 using a single CLS-triggered SB-600 flash in a mini-Apollo softbox off camera left. The camera was on a tripod and I used the self timer to allow me to get into the shot.

From our family to yours, I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving (assuming you are in the USA) or that you enjoyed the past week for whatever local reason you can find

Until 4 years ago, if you mentioned photographs on canvas to me, I immediately thought of cheesy, over-retouched family portraits in wildly ostentatious frames – photographs faked to look like old master paintings. I never took the medium seriously until our local photography group did a print comparison evening and someone brought a modern canvas print along. Unlike the horrid portraits of old, however, this one was beautifully saturated, vibrant and crisp. I was sold at that point and have been printing large pieces on canvas for exhibition use and for clients ever since. Aside from the superb colours and finish, the canvas also provides a wonderfully forgiving medium allowing larger-than-normal prints that still look fabulous. I’ve printed 6MP originals (albeit carefully upscaled) 5 feet wide on canvas and they look wonderfully sharp and not at all pixelated. Although I’ve printed the same images on paper at up to 50″, I’m generally not happy to take them above 36″ wide due to worries about obvious pixelation.

Another of my reasons for liking canvas so much stems from cost. People often complain about the cost of printing on canvas but if you factor in the cost of framing a 36″x24″ print, the canvas is easily $30 to $50 cheaper, even when using a simple black gallery frame. A gallery wrapped canvas can be hung as-is without any framing at all so the printing cost is the whole cost.

So why am I talking about canvas this weekend? Recently, I was contacted by a new company based in Austin called Easy Canvas Prints offering me a trial 16″x20″ canvas for review. I’m very happy with my current canvas supplier, Canvas Press but reckoned that this would give me a great opportunity to compare the two, especially since I had just created a new Pro account at Canvas Press and had a free 16″x20″ print to use from them too. For the sake of comparison, I ordered prints from each company’s web site using exactly the same 16″x20″ JPEG image with an embedded sRGB profile. So what did I find?

Before I start, you have probably noticed that I have a Canvas Press banner on this site already but, although I’ve been their customer for several years, I have tried very hard to be completely unbiased in my assessment of these two products. If you feel I’ve been unfair (or if you don’t but you just have more information to add), please leave comments with your own experiences for the benefit of others reading this post.

Web Sites

Both company’s sites offer a very easy user interface allowing you to upload pictures, select the print size you are interested in, pick various wrapping options, crop your image, pay for the print and send it for printing. In both cases, the interface is very easy to use, very clean and very nicely designed. Of the two, Easy Canvas Prints probably offers the most intuitive interface in that the controls required to start creating your canvas (selecting size and wrap option) are there right on the home page. Canvas Press, on the other hand, requires you to click an additional link to start the creation process. After this, however, both sites offer essentially the same functionality and do it very well. I really can’t fault either and have no real preference.

In terms of options offered, both sites offer similar wrap and retouching options. Both companies offer various print sizes, frame depths and three wrap choices, “Gallery Wrap” which wraps the existing image edges around the wooden frame, “Mirror Wrap” which mirrors the edge sections as the image wraps around the frame or “Color Wrap” which allows you to select a flat colour for the wrapped sides of the canvas. Easy Canvas Prints offers two frame depths, 0.75″ and 1.5″ and prints up to 40″x40″. Canvas Press offers a third frame depth, 2″, and supports any print size up to 96″x54″.

For me, the 40″ print size at Easy Canvas Prints is a serious limitation since most of the canvases I want to print are larger than this, typically panoramic images that may be 48″+ wide and 20″ or so deep. For most people, however, I suspect that the size limitation is unlikely to pose a problem and they certainly cover all the major sizes up to 36″x24″ and any custom size you may want within the overall 40″ limitation.

One other web site feature offered by Canvas Press but not by Easy Canvas Prints is a clincher for me. On Canvas Press, your uploaded images and canvas creation selections are saved allowing you to very easily reorder the same canvas or create another canvas based on an image you have previously ordered. On Easy Canvas Prints, however, I need to upload the image each time I want to order a print. Given that these images can be 25MB or so for large panoramas, the upload can take a significant amount of time so only having to do it on the first order is a real plus to me. Again, though, for people ordering an occasional print, this is unlikely to pose a problem since they are probably not going to be ordering multiple copies of the same image at different times.

Print Quality

I can forgive a terrible web interface (not that either of these are at all terrible, of course) if a company produces fantastic prints. To me, the quality of the final print is a lot more important than the usability of the upload and ordering system (as an aside, I use Nations Photo Lab for a lot of my paper printing because their prints are great but their user interface is truly horrible!). So how did the two companies fare?

The photo below shows the two canvases I compared. The top one is from Canvas Press and the bottom from Easy Canvas Prints. This was taken in mixed tungsten/daylight with a bounced flash so can’t really be used for colour comparison. I also suspect that it is slightly underexposed since, although the Easy Canvas Prints canvas looks closer to the original image (above) here, in better lighting, the Canvas Press one actually matched the image on my calibrated display significantly better.

Both images look great and I would have no problem hanging either one. The Easy Canvas Prints print is slightly cooler, brighter and less saturated than the original and is printed on a slightly lighter-weight canvas with a more distinct surface texture. The print looks more neutral compared to the slightly warm tones of the original image. Canvas Press’ print is closer to the original with better colour saturation and a more pleasing surface texture (to me at least). The colour temperature also more faithfully replicates the warmth of the original image. The print finish (coating?) is somewhat more glossy and results in a surface that I prefer. In case I was being overcritical, I asked my wife which she preferred and she also picked the Canvas Press print without knowing which was which. Seen in isolation, however, the Easy Canvas Prints print is still a lovely print but the Canvas Press one is definitely more impressive.

Mounting and Stretching

I have to admit that I broke my rule about ordering identical prints here slightly since I ordered the Canvas Press print with a 1.5″ mirror wrap compared to the 0.75″ gallery wrap I ordered from Easy Canvas Prints. Both prints arrived nicely stretched with no obvious bulges or bad corner folds. The images below show the backs of the two canvases.

The Canvas Press print definitely looks more “hand crafted” with the framing staples less regularly placed. The Easy Canvas Prints print is more regular and appears to have been printed on precut sheet canvas since the boundary markers, barcode and company name is visible on the rear canvas edges.

In both cases, the frames came fitted with a sawtooth hanger. Personally, I really dislike these and my first job on receiving a canvas is to install rings and picture wire to allow it to be hung using a picture hook rather than a nail. For larger canvases, I know that Canvas Press provide Beehive Hangars which I love since they make hanging large prints very easy indeed. Not having ordered a large print from Easy Canvas Prints, I don’t know what hanging solution they offer when the size gets into the 36″ wide range.

I have no complaints about the mounting of either canvas at all and both will look excellent hung. As an artist who typically resells canvas prints to clients, however, I would likely be unhappy to use Easy Canvas Prints due to the back-printing they have on the canvas. Canvas Press typically put a sticker on the back of their canvases advertising the company and this can be easily removed. In this case, I ordered the print via their Canvas Press Pro service and this automatically removes all Canvas Press markings from the back of the print. Easy Canvas Prints may offer the option to remove the back printing but I can see nothing on their site to indicate whether this option is available.

Customer Service

I have a lot more experience of Canvas Press customer service than I do with Easy Canvas Prints so any comparison I make is unlikely to be completely fair. That said, in the email dealings I’ve had with Easy Canvas Prints, I’ve been treated very well and all my questions have been answered promptly and accurately.

As for Canvas Press, I know they are fanatical about service. They have keen photographers on staff who can offer great advice and I know that they are determined to do what it takes to make their customers happy. On one occasion a couple of years ago, for example, they reprinted a 48″ canvas for me after it was stretched about 0.25″ off-centre. This is the only mistake I’ve ever seen in an order for them and they did the right thing to correct it.

In both cases, these orders were printed within a couple of days of the order being placed. I collected the Easy Canvas Prints image in person but had Canvas Press ship their canvas to me (for the first time – I usually collect my prints from them too).

Price

By this time, you have probably realised that I’m still more favourable towards the Canvas Press product than Easy Canvas Prints. The one area where Easy Canvas Prints currently beats Canvas Press hands down, however, is on cost. For comparison, I looked at the price of a 16″x20″ 1.5″ gallery wrap and a 24″x36″ 1.5″ gallery wrap on both sites. Here’s how they stacked up:

Easy Canvas Prints is currently offering an across-the-board 25% discount on all its canvases along with free shipping (which costs $15 from Canvas Press) and these amount to a very substantial discount compared to the Canvas Press price. It is worth noting, however, that there is no indication how long this offer will last and that Canvas Press frequently offer limited time discounts of a similar size. Comparing the prices without any discounts applied, we see that they are pretty much identical.

Conclusion

Overall, I would say that both companies do a good job. Easy Canvas Prints strikes me as aiming at the mass market – families ordering an occasional print to hang at home or give as a gift – whereas Canvas Press is geared more towards the professional photographer looking for large prints and making repeat orders. Since I fall into the second category, I will be sticking with Canvas Press but, given the current price difference, I would be quite happy to recommend Easy Canvas Prints to others who fall into the first category. Regardless of which company you use, you will end up with a lovely print and will receive excellent service.

Photos on Canvas