Metal Prints (free photos inside until Christmas)

Will this look good in metal? We shall see...

Another post that has nothing to do with skin retouching. If anything, this is a vestige from last month's theme, "everything but the photo." I looked at various print media, including "metallic prints" which are not to be confused with the latest trend making the rounds in photo magazine ads and on the web—"metal" prints.

Metal prints are photos printed directly onto specially coated sheets of aluminum. Bay Photo, the lab I use for clients through Smugmug, has been making a huge push for metal prints. I saw metal prints back at the PMA in Vegas, but at the time, I was paying more attention to the sudden preponderance of acrylic mounts. But since I am working on the "man cave"—my basement lair devoted to film and photography ("basement lair" sounds very creepy, doesn't it? OK, so it's a glorified home theater room born out of the need to remodel when our house flooded this past spring), I am suddenly interested in how to display photos in a modern, minimalist sort of way. The top contender right now is metal. The metal print doesn't need a frame. It can be mounted to "float" about 1/2 inch from the wall. Even better, you can clean the metal print with Windex. I'm impressed.

what about this in metal?

So will metal be the next canvas? Just when the "gallery wrap" thing was getting big, there's a push for a new "no need to frame" print medium. According to the Magna Chrome (a site that just slipped to the #2 spot on the google results for "metal prints"), "metal prints take on a magical luminescence." I have some eye cream that I bought in honor of my mid-life crisis that supposedly does the same thing, so don't blame me if I'm skeptical.


Call me a sucker for novelty, but I'm going to order a 16x24 inch metal print of one of the chair photos in this post. I have a thing for metal chairs (the kind you find in Paris parks are my favorite), and a metal print seems to be a good match for the subject. And since it's the season for giving, you can download (personal use only, not for resale) the photos in this post for free (or order your own metal print at cost) from the temporary gallery that will be up until Christmas.