Pages

About my journey with photography

The journey

Pho­tog­ra­phy has long since been my pas­sion (sec­ond only to my love for astron­o­my, the culi­nary arts, and clas­si­cal music). My pas­sion for trav­el and specif­i­cal­ly to des­ti­na­tions with spec­tac­u­lar land­scapes, has fur­ther fueled my jour­ney with the camera.

I remem­ber start­ing my pho­to­graph­ic jour­ney with my par­en­t’s Canon AE‑1 cam­era and a roll of cheap gener­ic depart­ment store film. If my mem­o­ry serves, I believe I had noth­ing more than a 50mm “paper­weight lens” and a dual-ring 80–200/f4 man­u­al focus no-name gener­ic lens. Those were the days…

That was eon’s ago regard­ing equip­ment, skill, qual­i­ty, and ambition.

My enthu­si­asm for this hob­by has only ampli­fied over the years and has been tak­ing me in the direc­tion of Fine Art Printmaking.

I con­tin­ue to enjoy the art behind image-mak­ing and always enjoy the jour­neys that I embark on to find the “next” large-for­mat print; how­ev­er, I focus more and more on the art and tech­niques behind mak­ing phys­i­cal prints.

The pho­tographs through­out the site cov­er a great deal of sub­ject mat­ter and have been select­ed from a long list of cap­tured images in var­i­ous film for­mats (35 mm, 6 × 7, dig­i­tal full-frame 35 mm), brands (Fuji, Kodak, Agfa) and a wide range of lens­es and cam­era gear.

These pho­tographs rep­re­sent a com­pendi­um of cap­tured images over the past 30 years, for the most part hav­ing been cap­tured using Canon 35 mm Manual/Autofocus and dig­i­tal equip­ment, Mamiya RB67, and most recent­ly Sony Alpha.

While the dig­i­tal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of my images locat­ed on the site is the eas­i­est method to show my work to the largest audi­ence, I pre­fer to dis­play my works in terms of Fine Art prints rang­ing from small Art Card style prints to images as large as 44 × 132 inch­es (~4 × 11 ft).

There is some­thing about see­ing your work in “tan­gi­ble for­mat” on fine lus­tre paper, fine art paper and can­vas that presents vast­ly dif­fer­ent­ly from an LCD screen.

My works on this site have been orga­nized into gal­leries and should be self-explanatory.

How­ev­er, spe­cial col­lec­tions, image sequences, exper­i­men­tal forms of pho­tog­ra­phy, and time-lapse work are scat­tered through­out the main gal­leries. These col­lec­tions and oth­er pho­to­graph­ic essays are my attempts to tell a sto­ry of an adven­ture, place, or subject.

Enjoy the images.

Cheers,
Rob Dabisza


Orig­i­nal­ly Post­ed: Sep­tem­ber 15, 2010
Updat­ed: Decem­ber 7, 2022


| Arti­cle post­ed in: || Tagged as: , |



Fine Art Prints


  • Note

    Since the pan­dem­ic, I have been re-eval­u­at­ing how I sell my fine art prints.

    The con­tent below is still rel­e­vant how­ev­er sale of fine arts prints is cur­rent­ly dis­abled. I am aim­ing to have the new store online by Nov 2021.


Introduction

Pho­tog­ra­phy has long been my pas­sion, and see­ing my works in phys­i­cal form has always giv­en me a sense of pride.

For these rea­sons (and oth­ers), I am pure­ly inter­est­ed in Fine Art Prints, not dig­i­tal down­loads for my imagery.

Blogs and dig­i­tal dis­plays come and go; phys­i­cal prints last a life­time if tak­en care of correctly.

Don’t get me wrong; dig­i­tal stock pho­tog­ra­phy has its place, I am just not inter­est­ed in it at this point in my journey.

There are many fac­tors in pro­duc­ing a Fine Art print, many of which are sub­jec­tive.  Paper type, size, mat­ting, fram­ing, posi­tion­ing and light­ing all go hand in hand with the sub­ject mat­ter and the sto­ry the image tells.

For exam­ple, some pho­tographs “look bet­ter” on Can­vas, where­as oth­ers on Lus­tre-based papers dis­play rich detail.  Please read the top­ics below to under­stand bet­ter the options I offer, how to order, etc.

Available Sizes

My pho­tos are offered in var­i­ous sizes gen­er­ally rel­a­tive to the 35mm film format.

While sizes such as 8x10, 11x14, 16x20 have been pop­u­lar over the years, a great deal of my images uti­lize the “full frame” of a 35mm neg­a­tive (for both film and digital).

Giv­en that sub­ject mat­ter with­in my shots often fill the entire image over the 36mm x 24mm frame, enlarge­ments are nev­er quite the above men­tioned sizes.

Exam­ple: A tra­di­tional 8x10 print is real­ly a crop of the 35mm frame for­mat (8x12 being the pro­por­tion­al­ly accu­rate dimen­sion). This extends to the oth­er com­mon sizes such as an 11x14 (real­ly an 11x17).

The upside is that the full poten­tial of the 35mm for­mat is real­ized, while the down­side is that the prints often require cus­tom fram­ing as the images would have to be cropped in order to fit in more con­ven­tional store-bought frames.

Addi­tion­al­ly, many of my large for­mat works are panoram­ic in nature and thus for­go any nor­mal dimen­sions, prints such as 24x65 inch­es, or 10x24inches are com­mon. All of these of course require cus­tom frame and mat­te jobs.

A word about the “real” size of these prints

It is extreme­ly dif­fi­cult to pro­vide a sense of how large these prints can be espe­cial­ly via a website.

For ref­er­ence, the ruler in the image is 36 inchs long (3ft or rough­ly 92cm). The large print of Mount Yam­nus­ka at the top is a 24 x 65 inch print and spans the entire image from left to right. The print of the cathe­dral ruins at St. Andrews (bot­tom cen­ter) is a 24 x 36 inch print.

Shipping and Packaging

As of March 2020, I no longer offer cus­tom frames or mattes.

Due to the size of the largest prints, the prints them­selves will be shipped in a paper based (card­board) ship­ping tube with plas­tic end caps in rolled form after the print has ful­ly dried (up to 2 days post production).

The ship­ping tubes are 3 inch­es in diam­e­ter to ensure that prints are not wrapped too tight­ly thus avoid­ing unwant­ed “curl”.

Addi­tion­al­ly the tubes are always shipped larg­er than the width of the print in order to allow for a buffer area between the print ends and the tub­ing end caps.

Note: I do not use elas­tic bands to bind the image dur­ing the rolling process as the chem­i­cals in the elas­tics have been known to dis­col­or and affect the var­i­ous papers.  A cus­tom paper sleeve has been designed to hold the paper snug­gly in place while avoid­ing bind­ing inside the ship­ping tube for ease of extraction.

The ship­ping tubes are gen­er­al­ly con­sid­ered safe for trans­port and are have thick enough card­board walls to pro­tect against the basic ele­ments such as driz­zle or snow while trans­port­ing from car to the house… they are not how­ev­er water­proof, do not sub­merge in water.

Struc­tural­ly the tubes are “sol­id”.

A quick word about borders and “borderless” printing

Prints are offered in two formats:

a) “bor­der­less” and

b) with borders.

Usu­al­ly a print size will refer to the image when print­ed in a “bor­der­less” fash­ion (i.e. print­ed up to the edge of the paper) how­ev­er is some cas­es such as print­ing on can­vas, it may be desir­able to allow for a 0.5 to 1 inch bor­der around a print to ensure that there is suf­fi­cient can­vas to wrap around a frame.

Please do not hes­i­tate to spec­i­fy your pref­er­ence when order­ing a print.

Orig­i­nal­ly Post­ed: Sep­tem­ber 15, 2010
Updat­ed: Octo­ber 20, 2021


| Arti­cle post­ed in: || Tagged as: , |