People are often surprised to learn that my prints are actually photographs. The combination of matte paper and the photocollage process takes them away from the look of a normal photograph. Each print uses several photographs, usually ranging from 2 to 7. For example, The Small Ones is based on 4 photographs: lizard on hoya leaf, lizard on screen, hoya vine, and saw palmetto. The first three are from my patio and the fourth is from Oscar Scherer State Park. I select pieces from the photographs and crop, rotate, duplicate and generally play around with them. The Small Ones has 470+ pieces, many in the lizard screens at the top and bottom of the print. Some photos, like the screen lizards, are "cleaned" to remove background material. Duplication is important: the lizard pairs are a single lizard reversed and overlapped. I also use transparency. In The Small Ones, the saw palmetto background and individual saw palmetto leaves are somewhat transparent, allowing the foreground material to be the dominant image. Sometimes I add blocks of color: the brown squares in The Small Ones are solid blocks of color, not photographs, but the color comes from the screen lizards.
The process starts with a creative phase and test prints and then evolves to detail work to get everything the way I want it to be. Every piece has my "chop", a "K" taken from a neon sign and then played with. I print on Hahnemuhle Museum Etching Paper or Photo Rag using a Canon IPF6300, an art photography printer that uses LUCIA EX pigment-based inks. These archival pigment inks have been tested by the Wilhelm Imaging Research, which estimates that displayed prints with UV protection will last over 125 years. Works are framed with archival materials and protected from UV light with either UV protection plexiglass or UV glass. I recommend using Tru Vue Museum Glass which not only blocks up to 99% of indoor and outdoor UV light rays, but also has the advantage of eliminating almost all reflection, thus preserving the matte quality of the print.