Over the past couple of months, I made myself a personal project; the creation of a large format photo album. Sounds like a single evening project, eh? No. I had to make it more challenging, of course.

Having spent the past few years twitching on the shutter trigger of, first a Canon EOS 70D, and since early 2023, a lovely Canon R5, I have gathered a few snaps I'm proud of. Professionals may find them flawed, but they are all personal ones and ones which make me happy and proud.

I'm sure many professional photographers claim they have a "house style". I must admit, I only follow and really admire the British photographer James Popsys who definitely has a beautiful style. But for some weird reason, my default style is simply to have a 2:1 crop ratio. I'm weird like that. When I take photos, this is always in my mind. Visually, I like to try for a range of styles and technical challenges (snaps in poor light, moving objects, etc.) and as it's a hobby, I don't want to pigeonhole myself. If I shot it and like it, it's in the album, apart from the two photos which were taken by my son and I blatantly stole 😇

As the Canon R5 can take very high resolution images (over 8k pixels wide), they scale up very nicely. So I went and got myself an Epson 8550 A3+ printer which has not only proven to be astonishingly good at doing its job, but also amazingly economical on inks thanks to using large tanks rather than cartridges. Coupled with specialist photo paper from Fotospeed (PF LUSTRE 275gsm 13" on a 14m roll), their printer colour profile, Adobe Lightroom and a smidgen of Photoshop, the prints emerge matching the screen very nicely.

I cut the roll photo paper to 690mm in length so that, along with a 25mm border, there's extra margin on the left for hole punching and bolting into the custom album. Speaking of which, this was made from two sheets of plywood, covered in padding material and then a thick blue fabric with webbing to assist with the "hinge" element. I then hand stitched (like a drunk monk, judging by the results) along the hinge line to give extra strength. I'm really proud of the end result even if after adding 52 sheets, it weighs a ton. And it's massive on any table top. But the detail of each print makes it so worth it.

Why did I do this? Because spending a long time taking photos, they are simply wasted on a hard drive. If I take over a 1,000 photos in one day, I'd be lucky to get one or two good enough to print off. And before I print, I doubly ensure it's edited perfectly. What I often throw onto Facebook or Flickr in a moment is never as finessed as when I pause before hitting "Print". The process has ensured I improve my editing, and is an extra step I recommend to all photographers.

The first 30 photos are of landscapes and miscellaneous. The last 22, plus rear inside cover feature cars.