HP comes to photographer’s aid
Photographer Chris Floyd recently looked to HP for help with his ‘One Hundred and Forty Characters’ project to reproduce his images as large-format portraits. Floyd worked with the HP Bracknell-based team which used the HP Designjet L25500 latex printer and HP Designjet Z6200 photo printer to output the prints.
"The project essentially puts faces to 140 of the online names I have become familiar with and I wanted to show a mixture of around 100 portraits comprising both individual and group shots," said Floyd. "I knew that, due to the strong, harsh tones in this particular project, inkjet technology would deliver a far better result than would be achieved with traditional photographic prints."
Floyd subsequently worked with the HP design team on the proofing of the artwork files to prepare the images for printing. "The images are very stark, saturated black and white prints on white background, which required lots of heavy black ink", he said. "HP was great at being able to bring this out, adjusting the contrast to ensure it was reproduced faithfully in the printed portraits.
Using the Designjet Z6200, HP produced 100, 16 x 20in prints on HP Matte Litho-Realistic Paper. This smooth, fine-art paper was selected thanks to its ability to successfully reproduce the strong black tones within Floyd's images. Thanks to the fast speed achievable with the Z6200 printer, the team was able to output the entire job in just half a day. Similarly, the specific attributes of the HP Designjet L25500 Printer proved critical in meeting the requirement to produce an additional 12 life-sized portraits measuring 6ft in height.
The project is being displayed at the Host Gallery, 1 Honduras Street, London, until 17 November.
www.100fortycharacters.com