A few of the prints I’ll be mounting and framing this weekend and over the next week…..

So there’s a couple of weeks to go before I set up the Millscapes exhibition at Saddleworth Museum, and I thought I’d do a post on the preparation.

Unlike my previous exhibitions, this one contains photographs from just two sites – Bailey Mill and Wellington Mill. This has given me some different challenges to previous exhibitions:

1) the body of work to choose from is signicantly smaller

2) the photographs I have to choose from are not my best work, and were taken early on in my photographic journey, so from a technical and aesthetic viewpoint are notes good as my more recent work. Don’t get me wrong, I’m as proud of them as any other photos, and there are a number of images from Bailey Mill that are in my portfolio, but I’ve yet to photograph anywhere and got 20 or more winners out of the shoot.

But, I realise that I’m being selfish here –  this exhibition is more about the mills than massaging my ego and showing my best work, and I’m happy to have the chance to exhibit in such a great little gallery. A few months back I visited the gallery to measure up and take a few pictures to help me plan my layout and so I could visualise how my exhibition would look.

I realised that with the space available, and the number of frames I have (20), then I’d need to do something a bit different to my previous exhibitions. I found that my local  Hobbycraft sells large 60x80cm frames, that while they don’t match my existing frames, are far cheaper than the equivalent custom made frames. So I invested in four of these, and bought some very large mount board from my local framers as I can cut my own mounts. 


The Saddleworth Museum gallery – I’ve got to fill this!

Two of the 60x80cm frames

What I can’t do is print bigger than A3, so I had to order enlargements from Photobox when they had a decent offer on (they’re a bit pricey otherwise!). The camera I was using in 2007 was a 6 megapixel Nikon D70 so the file size by today’s standards is somewhat small. I enlarged these using the Benvista Photozoom software that I’ve had for a few years and the results are pretty good – not as good as the 15×12 prints off my printer which are at the native resolution, but certainly acceptable.  I’m working on the basis  that viewing distance for larger prints is supposedly greater, although I’m sure there will be some visitors who will want to view them from a nose length away!

To complement my own images, the Museum have generously allowed me to use some historic images from their archive. These are of a variety of sizes and resolutions so I’m going to keep these away from the really big frames.