Chapter 9

How to Make
Beautiful Prints

Here’s How It’s Done

When does an image become real? This is a deeper question than it sounds because when you think about it, our images are trapped behind a sheet of glass. We can’t touch them. We can’t hold them. We can just look at them trapped behind these sheets of glass on our computers, and so even though we know they exist, they don’t seem real. That’s because they’re not real. Yet. To bring your image to life, you have to print it. Once you print it, you can touch it, you can feel it. It’s real at that point, and once something is real, it’s going to start asking you for things, like an allowance, and wanting to stay up past its bedtime, and to eat pie after 10 p.m. (which is strictly forbidden in our household, although I have always felt this was a cruel and arbitrary rule). Anyway, once you give a print “life,” you’ll undoubtedly wind up with some Dr. Frankenstein complex, and it won’t be long before villagers will be outside your photography studio with torches and pitchforks because, honestly, that’s how these things usually go down, and there’s nothing you or I or the ghost of Mary Shelley can do to stop it. You might as well just give the villagers what they want, which is unfettered access to the HBO GO app and a handful of Capri Sun juice pouches. That’s it. Give it to them and they’re on their way to the next studio. Anyway, this chapter is about how to make beautiful prints (which you probably figured out from the title, “How to Make Beautiful Prints”), but I think it bears repeating since there’s still a little room left before I reach the bottom of this page, and we’re almost there so if I can just stretch this out for a few more words . . . there. Got it.