Tag: photography

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Printing Photos

Two of the quilts I’m working on involve images printed on fabric. There are two ways you can do this: either print the image out yourself on your home printer or get a service to do it for you. Both of these have worked for me at different times, so let’s talk about the pros and cons of each.

Printing at Home

If you want just one or two photos, and you don’t need them to be larger than a standard 8.5” x 11” piece of paper, print at home. A package of printable fabric will run you anywhere from $15-25 (USD, in 2024), and it will get you six pieces of fabric that you can run through your printer. Make sure you get the correct kind of fabric for your printer – it comes in laserjet and inkjet versions. Follow the instructions on the back of the package – they’re not usually terribly difficult. Last time I did it, I printed on the fabric, then peeled the fabric off of the plastic it was attached to (to make it stiff enough to go through the printer) and soaked the fabric in water to set the image. Once it was dry, I ironed it, and then I was ready to go. Your instructions may differ, though – read the ones for the fabric you’ve purchased, please!

Printing with a Service

You may find other companies that provide this service, but I use Spoonflower. Spoonflower’s printing services are usually used by designers who have designed some sort of pattern to go onto the fabric in a repeated way, but you can also just have them print one large image on a yard of fabric. The largest I’ve been able to get one of my photos is about 20”h x 30”w (for a landscape photo). The fabric is good quality, and the colors come out true to the original. I have been very pleased with the quality of the images I’ve printed. If you have a large number of small images to print, or if you want an image that is bigger than a standard piece of paper, use a service such as Spoonflower.

Don’t forget! You must get permission of the photographer (the copyright holder) if you did not take the photograph you want to use. You’ll note that I got Oscar’s permission to use his photograph even though I am not actually going to print the image onto fabric. Technically, I don’t need his permission to create the quilt – my quilt would be considered “fair use” of his image under copyright law because I am using no part of his original image in the quilt. (Also, because the image was sent to us in a logbook compiled by the cruise company with the instruction to “share with friends and family,” my use of the image in my previous blog post is allowed.) But as a photographer, I put myself in Oscar’s shoes. I would very much want to know if someone liked one of my photographs enough to use it as inspiration for another piece of art. So I asked. (I also told Oscar I would tag him on Instagram in an image of the quilt when it’s done so he can see how I used his image.) GET THE PHOTOGRAPHER’S BLESSING for whatever you want to do. It’s common courtesy, and it’s the law. 

Also don’t forget that you don’t have to print out the photo to use it as inspiration for a quilt! Use the colors, or the shapes, or both to capture the spirit of the image instead of the actual photograph itself. Of the three quilts I’m going to be working on, two involve printed photographs, but one doesn’t. Use your imagination!

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What Works and What Doesn’t (Mostly What Doesn’t)

When I started working in earnest on this project, I started with the images. With over 45,000 images on my hard drive, there’s a lot to sort through. I have my favorites – the images that I come back to again and again when I need a background for a business card or something to hang on my wall or an example of what my photography is like. I started with my favorite images, but I began to realize that my favorites weren’t necessarily going to translate well into quilts that build on the skills I have. Let me explain using an example.

One of my favorite images from Acadia is a night shot that I took in September 2014 from a pull-out on Park Loop Road. It was an accident – I was doing 30-second exposures of the Milky Way, and I had framed it with an evergreen tree in the foreground that was completely black, which made the Milky Way behind it stand out. One of the dangers of long exposures is that, in a camera’s world, 30 seconds is a LONG time. A lot can happen in 30 seconds, especially out in nature. A plane or a boat comes out of nowhere and now you’ve got a light trail across some otherwise dark piece of sky or water. Or, as in this case, a car drives by. I was trying to time my pictures such that I wouldn’t get the headlights or taillights from cars passing on Park Loop Road behind me. But…a lot can happen in 30 seconds.

In this case, I had the camera set to do a 30-second exposure. Once I pressed the shutter button, there was nothing I could do to close the shutter and end the shot. I waited until a car had passed behind me and, hearing no other cars coming, pressed the shutter button. About five seconds later, a car came around the bend, and its headlights shone onto the tree I was using to frame the sky. You know, that tree I wanted to be black. Oh well. So much for that shot. But the car didn’t just pass behind me and continue on its way. It passed me, then stopped and backed into the pull-out where I was standing. All of a sudden, during the 30-second exposure, I not only had white headlights shining on the tree from behind me to the left, but I also had bright red brake lights shining on the tree from behind me to my right. Let’s just say that it was a good thing that the camera wasn’t recording audio. I cursed up a storm. I was 100% sure that shot was a complete loss. So I kept going, and I did end up getting shots exactly like I wanted them – the Milky Way in the distance over the water, framed by completely black trees in the foreground. They’re nice images. They would be perfectly adequate…if I hadn’t gotten that one shot with the white and red lights on that tree.

This photo has become one of my favorites from that night. It’s an interesting image with a good story behind it, and it was a total accident. It was one of the first images I thought of when I started looking through my photos for quilt ideas. It’s also one of the first images I rejected. I’m pretty sure I didn’t even have to look at it to reject it. Someone who has a lot more patience than I do and is eager to work with little fiddly bits of fabric would have a field day with this image. I am not that person. The image is too detailed to really do well in quilt format, at least for me. If I had better thread painting skills and was interested in figuring out how to faithfully recreate stars and the nebulousness of the Milky Way, this would be an awesome quilt. Maybe someday, but I honestly wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you.

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Photography

Over the years, I have naturally been drawn to landscape photography. I can appreciate others’ facility with city photography, or sports photography, or photojournalism, but I do not have those skills. Nor, frankly, do I have the desire to develop them. On a recent vacation with copious opportunities for great wildlife photos, I realized that I was so focused on composing each image that I was missing the shots that could have been good in post-production if I’d just TAKEN. THE. DAMN. SHOT. I am not, and never will be, the kind of photographer who is in the right spot at the right time and whips their camera out to get that prize-winning image. But that’s also not what appeals to me, so I’m totally OK with that.

Instead, I need to plan. I need to compose my shot, maybe take several with different compositions to see which ones I like better, think about it some more, and then maybe come back when the light is different. I like to revisit the same spots over and over again for a different perspective. In my favorite places, I have shots from different times of year, different angles, different times of day. Acadia National Park is one of my favorite places to visit. In seven trips there over 12 years, I’ve been there in all four seasons. I’ve taken night photography classes there as part of their night sky festival in September. I have my favorite spots along the Park Loop road, which I visit each day I’m there. I go at different times of day, which usually means different parts of the tide cycle. I go in any weather. I don’t plan out where I’ll be each minute of each day, but I know my favorite spots, and I know I want to visit each of them, and there is a vague plan to do that. Repeatedly.

My favorite images are “uncluttered.” Some excellent photography has a lot going on. There’s a focal point in the image, as there always must be for it to be a good shot, but there’s a lot of other stuff in the image to look at, take in, and process. You see something new in it every time you look at it. Not my favorite shots. There is a simplicity to the images that end up taking my breath away when I get them home and really look at them. Take the Crater Lake shot that I used for the quilt above my fireplace as an example. There is a focal point – the tree – and the tree has texture and movement to it. There’s a line that your eye follows when you look at it. But the background is almost absurdly simple. When talking over potential quilting options for that quilt with a long arm quilter, we talked about, but ultimately rejected, the idea of adding texture to that sky. One of the things I like best about that picture is that the sky is pure blue – no clouds, no mist, no sun. Quilting over that, adding unnecessary texture, would have ruined the image for me. 

Fortunately, these types of photographs lend themselves well to my skills as a quilter. I’m never going to be the quilter who produces ridiculously detailed images with itty-bitty pieces of fabric. I don’t have the skills, and I certainly don’t have the patience. I also don’t see the world like that, but I marvel at people who do and just leave them to their own devices when they’re working on their own stuff. I am happy to stay within my own wheelhouse, which is simple without being boring. (Trust me – I have simple photos that are as boring as dishwater.) I want to visualize large swaths of color, with texture or not, and be able to recreate that from digital format to fabric.

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Background on the Current Project

I’ve been interested in photography for a long time. I took art photography classes in high school and learned to develop my own black and white film (dating myself a bit, here!) and use darkroom techniques to get the images I wanted. When I joined the Peace Corps in 1998, the thing I most wanted to take with me from the U.S. was photos – mostly those that I took around home and on two major road trips from east coast to west coast and back again, stopping at national parks. Landscape photography has always drawn me in. With film, it was more difficult because I didn’t have the attention span or the patience to deeply learn the ins and outs of camera work. With digital photography, I was set free – to experiment, to learn, to get immediate feedback on what was going right and what was going wrong, and to get the images I wanted no matter how many takes it took to get me there.

I got my first DSLR in 2010, when I lived outside of Charlottesville, VA, within sight of Shenandoah National Park. Since then, I’ve taken DSLRs and other digital cameras on multi-state road trips, international vacations, and short jaunts around the corner or into the backyard. I’ve experimented with sports photography, night photography, and nature photography in addition to landscape photography, but it’s the landscapes that always have seemed to be the default for me.

Quilting is a newer venture. I taught myself to quilt in the fall of 2008, when I was seriously underemployed and had moved literally across the country for the guy I was dating at the time. I knew few people beyond my boyfriend and his grad school classmates, who, as PhD students, spent more time in the lab than out of it. I was, in short, bored. My mother’s old Singer sewing machine, a workhorse that was older than I was, had made the journey across the U.S., so I relearned how to use it and found a local fabric store and a book to learn from. Some of the projects from that year – placemats, a table runner, a couple of small blankets – can still be found in my linen closet.

My quilting skills can best be described as “better done than perfect.” I use my seam ripper as little as possible. I was recently, at age 51, diagnosed with ADHD, and my ADHD traits are clearly manifested in my quilting:

  • I start far more projects than I finish.
  • I get grandiose ideas but have absolutely zero follow-through, so few of them ever get realized.
  • I get bored and wander off if I have to do the same thing over and over again. 

I will never be one of those quilters who does intricate portraits or who can work with tiny blocks to create stunning works of art. I want my quilting to be simple and quick. The quicker it moves, the more likely it is to get done. All of the larger quilts in my collection took me years to finish, and each one was put away at least once for over a year when I got bored or frustrated and couldn’t look at it anymore.

When I was teaching, I had little time for quilting, or any of my other hobbies for that matter. Oh, I brought my crocheting to faculty meetings to occupy half of my brain while the other half took in the important stuff for work, but to dedicate an hour or two or five to putting together a quilt top was largely beyond me. So when I stopped teaching in 2020, right at the start of the pandemic, and got a job in the corporate world that really was only 40 hours per week, I decided that it was time to break out the hobbies again. Quilting was one of them; photography was another.

In 2014, I made a small quilt for my grandmother for Christmas. It was my first venture into using photographs in a quilt. We’d done an extended family photo session in the fall of that year, so I used some of the photos of us in a quilt pattern I found in a book called Panel Play. The quilt was little more than a lap quilt – it was meant for Grandma, at age 98, to take it with her when she was going to spend a few weeks in a nursing home while my aunt, normally her caretaker, was recovering from surgery. 

From there, the idea of using some of my own landscape photographs in quilts was born. Yes, I do still print some of them out on fabric – more about that later – to incorporate them into larger quilts. But the ideas are starting to expand out into other ways of turning what I produce with a camera into something that I create with fabric. There are three finished quilts (including Grandma’s), and about ten more planned in various formats – some with printing, some with thread painting, some using fabric to imitate the image, some using the image as inspiration for a color scheme or maybe something else. There are plans – well, actually mostly vague ideas right now – to try to figure out how to bring the beauty of some of my night photography – the aurora borealis and the Milky Way, specifically – to quilt form. What might any of this look like? Join me as I figure it out!

The Grand Canyon of Yellowstone, picture from the summer of 1997.
The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone in 1997. Even back then, the grand landscapes pulled me in. Maybe this will become a quilt someday?