UNIT 3 - AO3 - Display Pt.3 | Printing

So in part one of this final piece idea I had managed to construct the foundations for this display project. I'd hacked a Scanner to be able to produce scans that were over 1.5/2.5Gb's in size. And in Part 2 I went through the process of digitially adding adding in photographs onto the 35mm scans. For this article I'm going to be discussing my thoughts on how I am going to present and print out the scans/contact sheets.

So my main idea for with this project for AO3 is to create a wall display titled "The Dark Room", the display itself is made up of large prints on photo paper which is stuck onto one of the wall display boards in our art-classrooms. Another Idea I had is to print the film strips out and put hang them on lines as if they were actually in a dark room. Perhaps I could incorporate the themes from both of these ideas and make a new one.

To start I was intrigued by what size and shape I would print the reels out onto. Because I hacked the printer to do rediculous scans, image size wasn't an issue to me, however print size was - The normal printers we have at school can do Prints from A4 to A3 and have photo quality paper for both sizes. I began by printing in A3 and having 4 images per page of film (See below - Labelled Fig.2), I printed two of these out, cropped them and then stitched the two pages together using sellotape. I then wanted to see how the print would look like if I just had 2 images per A3 page (See below - Labelled Fig.1), again I printed two pages of A3 out, cropped and stiched them together where I then stuck the two tests against each other on a whiteboard to compare. Lastly I wanted to see how a print would turn out if it were printed out on A4 (See below - Labelled Fig.3), again using only two photos - the logic here was to see how much paper I could save as when it came out the size between the two shot prints of A3 and A4 were rather similar, Here's how all all three prints looked liked side-by-side:

Figures 1 & 2 were printed out onto standard A3 Cartidge Paper and A4 was the only one to be printed on schools supply of Photo paper. From what I can see, the A4 print appears to be over-contrasted compared to the original image on screen, if I were to choose to print on actual photo-quality paper, I would get it printed using more industry standard printers because the image quality will be higher and the colour/light depth shall probably be higher as well. Unlike Fig.3 though, Fig.1 and Fig.2 feel massively under-contrasted, because it was printed on cartidge paper the ink has slightly smudged resulting in the sharpness and exposure of the image to become blurry and faded, again this could probably be dealt with if I were to use proper paper.

Moving onto size, Fig.2s legnth looks nice but the size of the images definetely feels too small, I could possibly use this image size if I were to use the 'dark room hanging-film' idea but in general I'm not massively keen for using this to display the images. With my concept to save wasting paper, Fig.3 somewhat failed as the borders surrounding the image are far larger compared to Fig.1, meaning that'll probably ditch any effort in using A4 for this project.

One last thing that I wanted to mention is how the orientation of the strips of film. because some are in portrait and some in landscape I may not be able to have photographs with different orientations on the same strip. To combat this I could have strips that are horizontal for landscape shots and vertical strips for portrait shots. However; if the film were just left be, strips would look more authentic and realistic to a certain degree, I will have to decide which way I am going to do this before the exam.

Ironically, it was only after I spent the entire morning producing these test copys that I got informed that the schools D+T/Graphics department has an industrial-level printer. For now though however I've decided that I'm going to print these reels at around the size of A3 with roughly two negatives filling each page.