artd
Offline
• • •
Upload & Sell: Off
|
 p.3 #4 · "Professional" Photographers , sold artwork hanging in buildings and Nikon D800E | |
HopeIsEternal wrote:
With all this talk about the need in the forums for 36mpx AA-less cameras like the Nikon D800E, I been wondering what "professional" photographers who actually sell artwork use and what determines the ability to get a photo sold for money.
First, there is a difference between being selling artwork and being a professional artist. And then there is a difference between being a professional artist and a professional photographer. There can certainly be overlap in certain instances but they are different pursuits.
I've seen tons of great, technically excellent pictures from amateurs on photo forums like this one but yet each time I go into a commercial building and find photographs hanging on the wall, the photographs are not really sharp or as technically competent as the stuff I find here and on Flickr. In fact many times the photographs would be laughed out of many of the photo forums including this one for exposure problems, lack of sharpness, noise/grain, perspective distortion etc..
Why is this?
One reason is that it is a lot harder to make a good print than to make a good web-sized photo. A lot of those nice looking Flickr photos might not look so good as big prints either.
I used to co-own a photography gallery and I got to witness this firsthand. I have seen a lot of photographers who are very creative and have good compositional skills, and also a lot who were obviously very good with Photoshop. But they were not always good at understanding the printing process. The first problem was everyone seemed to want to print bigger than what was reasonable for the camera they were using. (Of course this was back in the days before the Canon 5DII, and high resolution DSLRs were not so commonplace.) What should be an 8x12 photo at most was getting blown up to 12x18, 16x24 or more. People would assume that because the photos looked nice on their computer screen, they will look good as a gallery print.
I did the same thing myself. A local gallery I worked with brokered a deal with a hospital to buy six of my prints. In a gallery setting I was displaying these as 10x15 prints which is as big as I felt I could go. The problem is the hospital wanted them twice as big. I explained to them about quality degradation when you print bigger but they didn’t care about that as long as the prints looked nice from a distance. So that’s what I gave them (although there was one lower resolution print they wanted that I flat out said no I just can’t do that). The prints would not be acceptable in a gallery setting. But the hospital was not a gallery, they looked fine from a distance, and the hospital was happy.
And even with modern high megapixel DSLRs like a 5DII, that just doesn’t mean you can print as big as you want without suffering image quality loss. I recently did 24x36 prints for an office conference room. They were not fine art prints by any means, they were photos of engineering projects. And they do not look that good close up. But they look fine from far away. And since it is a conference room, not an art gallery, everyone is happy with them. (As an aside, I have made 24x36 prints for gallery display, but they take a lot more care and work in capture and processing).
The other thing to keep in mind is that in a lot of cases the photos are not printed by the photographers. Sometimes they are printed by an admin person on their company’s plotter. I have seen a lot of that. And a lot of times the photos are not done by professional photographers either. Someone who works in the building has a bunch of photos they snapped with their point and shoot and they print them on the company plotter and stick them in a frame.
Does anyone know the process used by building managers, architects, interior designers etc.. to select photographic artwork to hang in buildings? What kind of prices do these photographs go for and are the photographs and the prices justified more by the cachet of the artist's name than by the content?
I imagine it’s different in every case. Sometimes someone at the company knows a photographer (professional or not) who they get to put their photos in there. Sometimes someone in the building just prints their own photos (see my above paragraph). Sometimes a building tenant will actually look for a bona fide artist, but will not always want to pay for one. A local art gallery had referred me to a company looking to buy original artwork for one of their new buildings in town. In the initial exchange they liked my work and so asked for prices for some fairly large prints. So I then I gave them the prices…and that was the last I heard from them.
Finally what does this say about amateurs and our unsatisfiable lust for more resolution, more details, more contrast, larger dynamic range etc.. if the pictures that people consider worth paying money for seem to have been shot with in JPG mode on 5mpx cameras?
It says that in a general, non-art gallery environment, content is usually more important than quality. But: in a gallery setting, that desire for better image quality is not wasted.
|
