Carl Hutzler’s Blog

Last December I shot a number of candids at a local Fairfax County elementary school. The principal wanted to install a number of large images of the kids on a couple of large brick walls in the entry area of the school. After about 3 hours of shooting on two separate days, I had a lot of great stuff to choose from.

For the first cut, I sent a link to the client to review the best images. Then we met for an hour so I could listen to what she liked and what we wanted to avoid. It was fairly easy after an hour to have a very good idea of what she liked and what would work well for the school.

I took another swipe at the images and narrowed the list to about 15 in total. On the day of the shoot, I also took a shot of the blank walls at the school. I used this to “arrange the best images on the wall” in photoshop, complete with drop shadows, etc. This helped me figure out how the images would look, how to arrange them, and spacing. But it also yielded an impressive “proof” for the client. And during installation, I used it to ensure each photograph was placed exactly as I wanted. This method really worked well. (click for larger)

Figure 1: Photoshop’d Proof for Client

I used Colours Imaging lab in Bailey’s Crossroads, VA for the printing. I use them exclusively for all my most critical printing. They are a great bunch of people to work with (ask for Rick!) and their printing skills are spectacular. The folks at Colours produced 13 of the finest 24×36 LightJets I have seen and flawlessly mounted them on black gatorboard with a heavy gloss laminate on top for protection. They mounted 2″ strips of gatorboard on the back so that when I hung the final prints, the images would be set slightly away from the wall (that was my idea :-)

The only thing I did not have a feeling for was how to mount the images. Rick at Colours suggested screws/nails in the wall which would rest/embed on the 2″ strips on the back of the images. This sounded good in practice, but with such a large number of images and the brick wall for inserting screws, I was hoping for something easier. Off to the Home Depot where I found contractor grade 2″ Velcro. It had a picture of hammers and tools being held to a wall with this stuff. I figured it would work for images on gatorboard (essentially extra thick foam core). I tried it at the site with the first image and it seemed very strong. Plus the velcro made it easy to position the images exactly where I wanted. And no drilling required! Plus they could replace a few images a year with some fresh ones if they wanted. Perfect :-)

The result is stunning. During the install people were coming up to me in amazement at how nice the images looked. It’s like having my own local art gallery :-)