The title of this print that won a LexJet Sunset Award at the Florida PPA conference this past year likely caught your attention. Sometimes a title gives you an impression that’s different than your expectation before you actually see the image, which can boost the impact it makes.

Cheri MacCallum, owner of Art by Cheri, Idaho Falls, is a photo painter extraordinaire. Photographers around the country send her files to paint digitally in Corel Painter to add that extra value that comes from painted portrait photo. Moreover, MacCallum’s work has won various awards, including the LexJet Sunset Award two years running at the PPA Western District Competition. We profiled last year’s winner, Dennis the Menace, and had to wait for national competition judging to unveil this year’s winner, entitled Snowy Morning, which scored 100 at the PPA Western District Competition. MacCallum found the scene depicted in Snowy Morning on a little dirt road outside of Idaho Falls. The first snow had just blanketed the landscape and MacCallum saw great potential in the composition. However, it wasn’t until she added the digital painting that she thought it would be competition-worthy. And competition-worthy it was, grabbing the attention of the judges for its composition, lighting...

Burma, aka Myanmar, is long way from Rochester, N.Y., home of Dick Bennett Photography, but Bennett struck photography gold there recently. Bennett was awarded a LexJet Sunset Award at the Photo North East competition for the image he captured during a trip with a group of photographers last November and December to Burma’s Shan Plateau. It was the only image out of about a thousand in the competition to score 100. Though it’s somewhat monochromatic, the shades of golden hues that permeate the image, along with the perfection of its composition, were elements that obviously impressed the judges. “It gets very warm in the afternoon and cold at night, creating a real nice mist in the morning. We got up for each of the sunrises, and one day about half an hour after sunrise I saw a hut on stilts with a pyramid shaped roof,” recalls Bennett. “It was a real golden hour for the light. It lasted about a minute and a half and when the person in the hut moved into the perfect position I took...

Amanda Crow, who owns a PostNet store in Norfolk, Va., knows the value of teamwork. She’s part of a team dedicated to honoring the 74 Naval Special Warfare members who have fallen in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as another team helping out Purple Heart recipients called Wounded Wear.

Aaron Thomason, owner of Arc Studios Photography in Dalton, Ga., knows the value of a print. It’s what helps showcase and sell his artistic portrait photography.

A bridge can be a metaphor for many things. For photographers, it’s about bridging the gap from capture to print.

Cheri MacCallum, owner of Art by Cheri, Idaho Falls, Idaho, is one of those talented few who have had the honor of winning a LexJet Sunset Award two years in a row.

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.

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...

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...