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...

Ann Naugher, owner of Hopkins Fine Portraits in Tulsa, is sought after far and wide for her artistic portraits of children. They bridge the gap between the realism of photography and what can be the surrealism of painting.

It’s rare to find someone from the next generation of photographers who prefers to shoot film over digital. This year’s LexJet Sunset Award winner for Best Quality Print and Presentation at the Plymouth Center for the Arts competition and exhibition, The Fine Art of Photography, is more than just a throwback to traditional photography.

Ghost Town in the Sky, located above Maggie Valley, N.C., is a themed amusement park that’s preparing to re-open to the public. As part of that, the “ghost town” needed some publicity shots and turned to veteran photographer Jeff Gulle.

Award-winning photography is often a fortuitous combination of skill and luck as was the first-place winner of the Commercial division and LexJet Sunset Award winner at the 2012 Professional Photographers of North Carolina print completion, Gregory Georges.

One of the great ironies of photography is that you can turn a certain weakness in the original capture into a strength that sets the tone and separates it from the usual. Such is the case with Bob Klein’s LexJet Sunset Award-winning image at the Photo NorthEast competition called Walking the Lonely Street, which was captured in a village near Vienna. The image has just the right elements that evoke an Old World scene. Or, as Klein puts it, “You can project yourself walking down the street in this scene.” Perhaps that’s what caught the judges’ eyes, but much of the beauty of portrait – aside from the framing of the street, the lone figure with an umbrella slightly off center walking away from the camera and the way the buildings come to a satisfying point on the horizon – is in its weakness. Klein explains, “It was overcast with poor light and light rain, but I loved the way it looked. At the time I considered it unfortunate, but in retrospect it was fortunate. That camera I used...

David Jeffery’s eye for photography comes naturally. Having grown up in a creative, artistic environment (his father was a painter, his mother a musician) he was naturally drawn to the arts. Jeffery’s creative outlet is photography and the artistic ethos he absorbed growing up shows in his award-winning work.