The One Behind it All
Exploring Iceland’s Highlands with my Canon R6
This is my first post for this as of yet unnamed digital printing blog, and for today I hope to let you know who I am as a person, and my experience with digital printing, as well as the goals and topics for this blog.
For those who don’t know me, my Name is Elliot Lovell and as of 8 months ago I am the Lead Fine Art Printer at PhotoLab Berkeley here in Berkeley California. My passion for photography and eventually printing started back in 2015 when I started tagging along with my father on his photography adventures, before I got my own camera, a Nikon D500 in 2017, and went off to college to study photography at Northern Arizona University. To help pay for my education I got an on campus job as a photography technician, where I first came into contact with digital printing as a student worker assisting with University’s Digital Print Lab. Here I learned a lot of technical skills associated with digital printing and inkjet printers, and after taking printing courses I got to experiment with the artistic side of printing. While working at the University’s Digital Print Lab I really fell in love with printing, both with the excitement of printing my own work but also the joy of helping people print for the first time, and working with them to turn a previously intangible item into a physical print. After graduating in 2022 I did a few odd jobs, some photo related others not until landing the job I have here at PhotoLab Berkeley.
As the Lead Fine Art Printer it is my job to not only produce high quality Giclee prints, but to work with customers to make prints work for their needs, from choosing the right paper, to file prep, and discussions about mounting. I am in the lab 40 hours a week doing it all.
This blog is meant to not only be part of my work, but an extension of my passion for printing and a chance to dive deeper into the world of fine art printing and learn more about it as this blog grows and expands. My hope is to do monthly updates to this blog, going over everything print related from guidelines and tips on how to print, to discussions on paper and what to look for when choosing a paper, and to even more philosophical discussions like printing ethos and the future of digital printing. One of the things I love about printing is the realization of a digital image into a physical medium as a print, but this also leads to difficulty discussing printing online in a blog such as this. How can I explain the differences between two prints in front of me, when all you see is a digital screen. This is a problem that challenges all online discussions relating to printing, and I will do my best to work around it by providing photos, and as much of a detailed description as possible. Let us remember that digital printing is still a relatively new technology that is constantly evolving and for those of us in the industry there is always something to learn.