The New PDF  (14mb)

The new ipad friendly galleries

Agency requests for a physical photographer’s portfolios have fallen to an all time low. At the same time  - having the work available to view on a mobile device has assumed a new importance.

Yes, for the quality conscious photo buyer, seeing prints in high resolution (as opposed to on screen web renditions) is reassuring.

But if the book consists of ink jet prints, it has to be very large to impress the viewer in that sense – and prove that the images and retouching bears close scrutiny. Few take into account that ink jet prints only achieve an effective resolution of around 100 dpi. What this means is that even a moderately generous sized web image contains more detail than the print in the average portfolio ‘book’.

And what is more, with a back lit screen, one can judge the tonal range of the image more critically. If a client really must ‘feel the weave’  - you just send them high resolution files. The demise of the physical book may have been exaggerated – but not by much.

No one can deny that a physical book has a few things going for it which a digital file lacks. One is tactile  -  it may be a unique physical object, and two is the format in which one sees images in a fixed relationship to each other.

The new automotive/landscape PDF was produced to appear as spreads although one can still zoom in and see it in single page format. At 15 mb it is a fair sized download but when viewed on a pad device it gets closer to a physical book in one sense. One can touch the pages.

Roll on the introduction of very high resolution displays for pad devices. It cant be far away. Photos and photo books will come alive in ways they never could in the past.

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