Last month, we looked at some of the reasons you might want to consider printing your work. (See here.) Living with your prints, and seeing them every day will sharpen your judgement and improve your work. A printed photograph is likely to be a more permanent means to preserve your memories. (For an interesting take on this, see “The Lesson from Costco’s Photo Lab”) And printing can be a valuable way to curate a meaningful body of work.

If you decide to print, you will find that the process is not easy, and it is not cheap. There are two options: buy a printer and print at home, or send your work out to a photo lab.

If, like me, you came up in photography before the advent of digital, a photograph was a physical object; a print, or a slide. Photographs were distributed and seen as prints on photographic paper or in the pages of books and magazines. You could hang a photograph on the wall or fold it up and carry it with you in your wallet. It was a real object in the real world.