Dan Johnson, owner of Dan Johnson Photography in Grand Rapids, Mich., is a regular fixture here at the LexJet Blog. Johnson is always chock full of great ideas (make sure to click here to read about his spray booth, for instance) that build business and generate cash flow.

Perfect natural lighting for photography can be like a box of chocolates: you never know what you’re going to get. If you see it coming, however, you better wait for it. At least that’s the way Terry Blain of Terry Blain Master Photography, Carlisle, Pa., approached this award-winning shot.

Some of the greatest photography is accidental, or at least not pre-planned and posed. Such was the case with Little Miss Muffet, which won a LexJet Sunset Award, Best in Show and Best Portrait of a Child at the recent American Photographic Artists Guild (APAG) competition.

Some of the greatest photography is accidental, or at least not pre-planned and posed. Such was the case with Little Miss Muffet, which won a LexJet Sunset Award, Best in Show and Best Portrait of a Child at the recent American Photographic Artists Guild (APAG) competition. For Little Miss Muffet, it was less accidental and more what the winning photographer, Tracye Gibson, calls a “grab shot.” “My camera was on a stand and my Pocket Wizard was in my hand. I was adjusting lighting while she was playing around and making silly faces. I knew the lighting wasn’t perfect and neither was the focus, but since I usually paint my images in Corel Painter anyway, I just kept snapping away while I was adjusting everything,” recalls Gibson. “When a good friend, who knows my style of work, saw the raw images, she said, ‘You have got to paint that as Little Miss Muffet!’ Sure enough, she was right.” For the competition, the image was printed with her Epson Stylus Pro 7800 on LexJet Sunset Photo...

With the large-format inkjet printing tools and media now at your disposal you can decorate just about anything, and turn the humdrum into something special. That’s exactly what Brett Feldman, owner of Unlimited Exposures, Manalapan, N.J., did at a recent bar mitzvah.

Michael Zerivitz, DDS is a Deltona, Fla.-based dentist who’s had a lifelong fascination with photography. Though his photography is a sideline to his successful practice, Zerivitz has been practicing photography since high school. That continual practice, plus the help of his professional photographer friends in the Orlando area, helped make Dr. Zerivitz a distinguished award-winning photographer. “I set photography aside after college while I raised a family and started a practice. Then I went to back to school at Daytona State College, which has a great photography program, and started getting together with mentors in the Orlando area,” says Zerivitz. “I have some really good professional photographer friends who have a group called the Portrait Artists Group and I was fortunate enough to be invited to join them. I have to give credit to my friends and mentors in the Orlando area who have helped me become a better photographer.” Zerivitz was recently honored with a Distinguished...

Give the people what they want is an excellent phrase to keep in mind when you’re designing anything. In the case of Douglas Liquors in North Attleboro, Mass., the owner – who happens to be English – wanted to immerse his customers in a traditional London tavern.

Louis Brevetti, owner of printmyphotooncanvas.com based in Wolcott, Conn., estimates that he’s produced more than 1.5 million canvas prints during his career as an art publisher and as an art print provider for big box retailers. Now, Brevetti aims to continue that production rate but with a different focus and a new online business. The strategy is simple: provide high-quality canvas prints at an affordable price with free value-added services to boot (color adjustments, red eye elimination and touching up minor blemishes). Over the years Brevetti has learned through trial and error how to keep quality up and production costs down. What he found was that with the right printer, inkjet media and finishing methods it was possible to do it and keep materials and production in-house and in the U.S. “We came up with a method to produce and finish canvas that allowed us a fantastic production rate, but the quality of our images was just okay. That’s how I found Dustin Flowers at...

Stephen Kerner, the Woodstock, N.Y.-based fine artist (www.stephenkerner.com) and fine-art printer (www.stonerivergiclee.com) profiled here at the LexJet Blog about this time last year, is no stranger to the abstract. Nor is Kerner a stranger to complicated, outside-the-lines projects that challenge and perplex.

Astrophotography is about as niche a market as you can find in photography. Though composed mainly of astronomy enthusiasts, astrophotography may have some sales potential. After all, there are few things as striking as distant galaxies and nebulas to hang on the wall in large format. However, astrophotography for sale in the printing market is relatively untested and making the images is a complex, time-consuming process. Moreover, the approach to astrophotography is somewhat counterintuitive when compared to typical studio and daylight photography. “When you make a print, the quality of the print is going to have a direct relationship to the signal-to-noise ratio in the image. If you try to print something with a low signal-to-noise ratio it will look awful. People think when you raise the ISO it makes the image noisier; it doesn’t. The noise is the same. In fact, with digital cameras, and DSLRs specifically, the noise actually goes down when you raise the ISO. The trouble is...