Print mounting

I am on vacation and finally had a bit of time to mount some of my prints, which I am going to hang in my home office. The home office is rather more important as the hospital has decided to remove our offices because there are workplaces at the operating and intensive care departments. That any doctor would have "stuff" or "papers" is apparently nonsensical. The patient data management system is digital now, and thus we do not need papers, and do not need a personal space.

Anyway, mounting prints is almost as much of a discussion point in photography as all the other things. I learnt how I do it from a Luminous Landscape tutorial, but since I mostly mount smaller prints I eschew hinging the mats, and mostly only mount with mounting corners. We will see.

First and foremost we knoll, as we learnt from Adam Savage through Tested.com. We have four prints and five sets of frames, backs and mats. So, we'll have to find a final print somewhere. When we haven't decided which prints to mount it is an idea to get symmetric mats so that we can decide which whether to use portrait or landscape orientation later. If we know which print we will mount, then slightly asymmetric mats with a thicker lower edge is often more elegant. Let's start with the elephant.

Step one is to place the print and fit the mat. An important point is that it shouldn't  move until it is fixed in place, for that purpose we use a weight. A, flat, clean and heavy weight.

With the weight in place we then place the mounting corners. Since these are small A4-size images, they will stay in place using just corners and the mat. Once the picture is securely mounted, we need to double-check that it fits the mat so that we don't find any mistakes after we mount it.

The frames are Nielsen aluminium profile frames that we put together with these simple corner fixtures consisting of a right-angle plate with two set screws and a shim to distribute the force on the aluminium. In addition there are two hanging fixtures to slide in, and fasten with set screws. For now we will leave one side unmounted to be able to get the print in.

Before sliding the mounted print in, we peel the cover off of the plexiglass and place it on the matted picture and make very sure there is no dust in between. A simple dust blower makes short work of any dirt. By now we really should have signed the mats if we wanted to do that.

In order to keep the stack of backing, print, mat and glass in place the Nielsen system uses leaf springs that you push in under the edges of the frame. I tend to use two per side for A4-size prints.

The last step is to put some hanging wire in place. By only twisting one side to start with it is easy to regulate the height when we actually hang the prints. Oh, and that's one, now for the other four, whereof one needs to be selected and printed first.

But, after all that I have more of my own art on the walls, which is nice. Thank you for following along.