Video: Berea Printing Reviews Sunset Canvas

In the video above, Berea Printing’s production manager, Phil Crawford is “returning the favor,” something he does on a regular basis through his YouTube channel, The Promo Video.

Berea Printing Sunset Canvas“I’ve done several product reviews; it helps with our YouTube rankings and they’re informative. I spend a lot of time looking on YouTube looking for products and services. YouTube is a great resource. This is a way to give back and help someone else figure out something. It’s a way of returning the favor,” says Crawford.

Berea Printing, based in Berea, Ohio, just south of Cleveland, has been in business since 1967. Crawford joined the company in 1997 and has seen it transition from analog offset to a fully digital shop, both on the commercial side with three Konica 8000s, and the wide format side with the HP Latex 25500 Printer.

In addition to traditional commercial printing applications like catalogs and brochures, the company specializes in specialty printing for marketing and promotions. Wide format printing is an integral part of that specialty mix.

“We create a lot of marketing products. Wide format printing has come in handy for us to create specialty items and interesting products because our customers want something unique and eye-catching,” says Crawford. “Our dominant wide-format product is LexJet Simple Adhesive Vinyl SUV, which we use as a poster material on foam board. It’s the most consistent vinyl we’ve tried… hands-down.”

Regarding this review of Sunset Production Gloss Canvas SUV, Crawford says: “We’ve tried a lot of canvas materials, and the canvas Erin Krcmar [Crawford’s LexJet rep] sent me was clearly the best material. Most of the canvas material we’ve tried, if you rubbed it or looked at it wrong, the ink would fall off of it, and when you stapled the canvas, it would tear, which was a big problem. This stuff is great, and it’s inexpensive.”

Blowing in the Wind with Banners

Loris Printing, Sandusky, Ohio, was on the lookout for a durable banner material to hang up for a Value City Furniture Christmas season promotion on a busy street near Lake Erie. The problem with the location is, well, Lake Erie and the inclement weather and high winds peculiar to that area, especially in the winter months.

Banner by Loris PrintingLoris Printing vice president Craig Hofer turned to his LexJet customer specialist, Rob Finkel, for some direction. Finkel recommended LexJet 11 Mil Valeron Banner finished with LexJet Heavy Duty Banner Tape and LexJet Banner Ups.

“We printed the banner and sent it to the city because the city has to hang it. The guy brought it back to the shop and said they wouldn’t hang it because it was too thin and would get destroyed in the wind,” recalls Hofer. “I told them it wouldn’t rip and personally guaranteed that if it did rip we would replace it. They reluctantly hung it up the week of Thanksgiving. It’s been up ever since and it’s absolutely taken a beating. It hasn’t ripped yet; it looks just as good as the day they hung it up. We had to educate people about the material because they assume a thinner material isn’t going to work.”

Hofer adds that they printed the banner on a Canon iPF8300 and didn’t use a laminate or liquid coating; the print went straight off the printer, seamed on the sides with the banner tape and Banner Ups secured to the corners.

“The material imaged perfectly. We had several people stop in and say how nice that banner looks. We’re kind of new in wide-format and I take Rob’s word for it. His advice has always worked really well for us, so it’s obvious he knows the products,” adds Hofer.

Storefronts that Sell with Prints on Perforated Window Vinyl

Printing window graphics

Award-winning studio photography deserves to be front and center, and when appropriate, larger than life. And so it is at Peters Photography, a family-owned studio with three locations in Ohio – in Dublin, London and Centerville – and a national reach through the recognized expertise of its photographer crew.

The photographers – which include founders and owners Larry and Karen Peters and their daughter and son-in-law Janine Peters Killian and Brian Killian – capture the essence and personality of their subjects through the breadth of their studio work, including families, babies, children, high-school seniors and individual portraiture.

Printing window graphics on perforated window filmTheir largest and most visible studio, with plenty of window space facing a roundabout that runs by it, is at the Dublin location. It’s the perfect spot, with all the right ingredients, to showcase the studio’s top-notch, colorful work.

Lab manager Matt Baxter printed the latest round of images chosen by the photographers on LexJet Aqueous Perforated Vinyl (70/30) with the studio’s Canon iPF8100 to fit within the approximately 27″ x 54″ window panes that run alongside the studio, and the front door.

Brian Killian installed the panels, some of which were set up as individual images within each pane while others are one large image encompassing all three panes. “We make sure we cut out the right gaps so they stay proportional and don’t look out of whack,” says Baxter.

Baxter adds that the images have been up for about a month and are no worse for the wear, despite the see-sawing early spring weather in Ohio from hot to cold and dry to wet.

“We’ve been doing a lot of promotional printing lately,” says Baxter. “And with the Canon printer we haven’t had to build our own custom profiles like we used to. With the LexJet profiles, the Canon plug-in and driver, everything prints out the way it’s supposed to, it looks right and we’re not guessing.”

The LexJet Aqueous Perforated Vinyl makes the images opaque from the outside looking in, but people inside the studio can see out. The vinyl also provides a tinting effect that keeps glare down inside the studio’s lobby as well.

To keep things fresh the images will be replaced with another set in another six months or so. Until then, the promotional images will play their part, drawing people in from the street to the studio and building the Peters Photography brand.

For more information about Peters Photography, go to http://family.petersphotography.com/. And, to see what makes this dynamic studio tick, go to http://www.photovisionvideo.com/premium/peters_0515/.

From the Basement to the Catbird Seat at Woodard Photographic

Large format inkjet printed products for photographyWoodard Photographic, based in Bellevue, Ohio with seven locations in north-central Ohio, is a senior high school portrait powerhouse that began in George and Karen Woodard’s basement in 1965. Now co-owned and operated by their son, Marc, and an outside family member, Roger Wilburn, Woodard Photographic has maintained its primary focus – high-end senior portraits – while steadily growing its business to encompass much of the region surrounding northeast Ohio.

Woodard Photographic is an extremely savvy business-minded company that hasn’t lost sight of the art of photography in the process. The company quickly branched out from its Bellevue roots, touring high schools in north central Ohio and into Michigan in a mobile studio.

Inkjet printed photographic productsThe mobile studio became the basis for the addition of one location after another. Woodard Photographic’s Ohio locations now include the company headquarters in Bellevue and another location in town, along with locations in Akron, Brunswick, Columbus, Perrysburg and Westlake.

“In 1990 we opened our first branch office and have since done away with our mobile studios and gone to seven locations across Ohio whereby we provide a high-quality, on-location look. We provide mainly senior photography and the rest of what we do draws from that work in the schools and the community,” says Marc Woodard. “We are vertically integrated; we’re one of the few large scale photographers that maintain their own lab.”

Inkjet printing photo products and promotionsWoodard Photographic’s lab is now 100 percent digital. The company began integrating digital technology in 2000, converted all the studios over to digital in 2001 and added large-format inkjet production about five years ago. All of Woodard Photographic’s printing is centralized at the Bellevue headquarters. “We pride ourselves on the quality of our photography and we centralize to maintain that quality and convenience for our clients. We have drivers that go to our locations with supply drop-offs and to pick up work, and orders are direct-shipped to our clients,” says Woodard.

When Woodard Photographic first added large-format inkjet printing, the company used it mainly to print posters and other promotional displays. “It was basically a support printer,” says Woodard.

Printing wallpaper borders with an inkjet printer
This is a great school spirit product: Wallpaper borders printed on Photo Tex.

“Now we print posters, banners, table runners, wall murals and borders. This past summer we took a real hard look and decided to integrate re-sellable product lines to our mix as well. From a sublimation standpoint, we’re printing license plates and dog tags, plastic license plate frames, can cozies, yard signs and other promotional add-ons. We have so many different products going it’s not even funny, but it opens up whole new avenues of printing. We’re geared toward doing intricate design work, mass producing it and adding personalization to the image,” adds Woodard.

The challenge in the Facebook age is to maintain the connection with the client and provide products that evoke the original emotion of the photo session. “We’re trying to create an in-studio experience that they can’t produce on their own at home. As we embrace inkjet it opens up a whole new level of product line. You can now offer a high-end leather coffee table book or wall murals and borders. You have to think differently and be smart enough to do it to make money as a professional. You have to give a reason for the client to come in, and that comes down to experience and emotion,” explains Woodard.

The addition of a Canon iPF8300 in July and another one from LexJet in October helped Woodard Photographic begin to fulfill that goal of providing unique large-format products to its client base. Woodard is especially impressed by Photo Tex, a repositionable adhesive fabric that can be re-used.

Printing photo products with a Canon printer“A lot of our ideas have come through talking to LexJet, watching the videos and reading the blog, and Photo Tex is the coolest thing I’ve seen in awhile. Because of our large client base we don’t put any product out there until it’s fully tested, so I printed a 16×20 sample of Photo Tex, cut it in half, put half in my office and the other half on a westerly facing side of our building on brown metal where the sun would bake it in the summer,” says Woodard. “I put it up on July 8 and brought it back inside after eight weeks or so and held it up against the print we kept indoors there was maybe a 10 percent change in the quality in terms of fading. Then I scrunched it into a ball, pulled it back apart, applied it to the wall and smoothed it out, and you couldn’t see any wrinkling. This is what excites me. We ended up creating some wallpaper products for our schools where we can affordably print self-adhered wallpaper for doorways, school spirit banners for seniors and created a whole new market for us.  It has less to do with our photography and more our connection with satisfying our clients’ needs, the schools we service. This allows us to sell some other cool things to them.”

Ultimately, says Woodard, it’s about creating differentiators as the photography market continues to evolve. As digital was the big wave earlier in the century, inkjet has the same potential, coupled with advancements in social media and all the doo-dads – iPads and whatnot – that go along with them.

“The big thing our industry has to deal with is creating value for the client so they want to own our printed products. The Jake and Emilies, as we call them, are sophisticated and increasingly dependent on electronic images on their phone and not necessarily interested in prints,” says Woodard. “So how do we make money as an industry if they’re simply putting their electronic images in their phones and we’re not getting paid for printed images? It’s a struggle, but it’s also an opportunity for those who have a vision of what’s possible. I really think it’s an exciting time in the industry as the transformation takes place. We went through a huge transformation with digital and we’re going through a similar one now.”

For more information about Woodard Photographic go to woodardphoto.com and liveyouryear.com.