Blockposters; An interesting medium

I've always been interested in photography outside of the digital medium. In my opinion, there is something special about a print. Whether hanging on the wall of a gallery, or the door of a dorm room, there seems to be something a bit more personal about analyzing the art of a photograph when it is actually in front of you and not backlit on a monitor. So, since watching the street art documentary "Exit Through the Gift Shop" over the holidays, I've had a growing itch to find an interesting tool that will allow me to display my photos outside of the digital medium. How ironic that I found that tool online.

While scanning through some photography websites and blogs I came across a site called blockposters.com. The site allows users to upload a picture of their choice and then breaks the picture ip into several large page sized pieces. The pages, now in pdf form, act as puzzle pieces when printed out and fit together to form a much larger poster sized image.  I used a picture from the previous post for comparison.

The website gives the option of printing landscape or portrait, as well as the number or desired rows and columns.

Now all I had to do was print the pdf file generated by the site and trim the edges.

Important note: I chose to shrink the images to fit within the print margins for fear that the pictures would not print properly. This resulted in me having to trim a good amount of white edge around each of the pieces. Next time I will take a chance and forego the "shrink to fit" option when printing.

Although I found this to be an excellent and unique way to display photography there can be some cons to the process. One of the biggest things I found less than perfect about the process was that the maximum file upload is 1MB. I initially thought this would kill the clarity of the end product,  but in the end it didn't seem to matter much at all. You can see for yourself in the image below as the pages cover the floor or my living room. The final dimensions of the printed and trimmed block poster were 5' 3" x 3' 6".

The 36  printed "blocks" of the poster as I trimmed their edges.

Coloring with Totally Rad Photoshop Actions and Plugins

   Over the past months I have devoted a good amount of my free time to exploring photography styles and developing it into an art that I can call my own "style."  Along with a a recent studio lighting class, this is another of my efforts in an attempt to stand out from the entry level DSLR owners and growing population or photography hobbyists.
   I have adopted a method many artists use in developing their own style. I closely examine and deconstruct the work of other photographers, and incorporate things that I like with techniques I already know. This doesn't only apply to the shoot, but also to the way others go about post processing. So, my efforts led me to post processing and coloring. Ever since, I've been using tools like Rad Lab by the Totally Rad company to give my photos that "little something extra."

Here, I've colored some pictures I shot of a friend Amanda St. Pierre, a beautiful and extremely talented artist herself.

Check out Amanda's cover of Ingrid Michelson's Die Alone, and download it free from Soundcloud.