Printing History
We adopted digital printing very early, about 1998. Our first printer was the Epson Stylus 600, and it was love at first sight. We faced all the problems that fine art printers end up facing, but we enjoyed printing so much that finding solutions seemed like fun.
Eventually (a few years later) we ended up in Pacifica, California, training with Stephen Johnson. Stephen was instrumental in the early development of digital and has been an alpha and beta tester for Epson (and other) manufacturers for 20+ years. Because we took that training at such an early period, we had access to some of the pioneers of digital. His classes were attended by Thomas Knoll (creator of Photoshop) and Bruce Frasier (wrote many of the color profiles for photoshop) and other influential creative geniuses. Stephen himself wrote some of the original black and white routines for photoshop.
With that influence we were able to overcome the problems of color matching (much harder than it looks) and print permanence. (We need our prints to last for many, many years without fading or changing colors).
I think it's safe to say that for us, printing is our favorite part of photography. All the planning and shooting, and editing, and reediting and meeting with clients has an unsatisfactory ending without beautiful prints. Showing your images on a tiny monitor (or even a big one) or on a small print simply doesn't show all the glory of the end result. Seeing a large print come off the printer is the reward for all our/your hard work and creative genius.
