UNseeN Magazine | The Official Photography Magazine

Same Same, Gallery 4A, 7 November 2008.

It's about three weeks before the opening of the show. I've been driving past this framing factory near my house for years. Kind of doggy looking so I've never bothered enquiring any further. I thought I would check it out this time because I needed some frames. Inside I discovered an Addladin's cave of frames and framing equipment. There were stuff lying everywhere. If you need some good frames made cheaply this is definitely the place to go. Email me for the details.

I haggled an amazing price for eight custom made frames. One week later they were in the boot of my car. I expected them to be a bit rickety and not the exact sizes because of the price I paid but they turned out to be super sturdy and cut to size accurate to the millimeter. The frame makers did a brilliant job.

I even brought acid free mount boards for cheap from the factory.

The prints took about four days to arrive.

I dread framing but do find the end result satisfying. Because there's so little hands on work in photography these days I hope to continue doing as much framing of my own work as possible. The first picture took me about two hours. It took about two days to do all eight. I was walking with a limp and was sore for 4 days afterwards from having to kneel, cutting and measuring.

Same framing tips: I thought I would be clever and cut the board on carpet, thinking the carpet would disguise any marks. Wrong.

The cutting matt makes it hard for the blade to slice through the board so I layed down some paper. My A2 cutting matt wasn't big enough to slice my mount board so I made an extension. Another tip, avoid cutting through staples in the newspaper and damaging the blade, like I did.

When I accidentally cut though a staple I used too much force and over cut the frame. There wasn't anything I could do to make this mark go away. Bugger.

If you cut with a blunt blade these jagged edges result. You can sand them back with sandpaper but it's never as smooth. Time to replace the blade.

The framing factory actually did too good a job cutting my frames. The size of the glass fit so tightly in the frame that when I tried getting it out it snapped. Bugger. How long will it take to cut another piece of glass to size? I hoped no more then a day. I went back to the factory the following day and as I thought they were looking for a piece of glass for my frame, they had already cut a piece to size. It took 5 seconds on their gigantic glass cutting contraption. That framing place rule.

I had been bugging Aaron for the measurements to layout the wallpaper for weeks. He finally just asked me to work it out on the computer and send him the individual A0 size squares. I made a Photoshop document the same size as the wall space of the room. About 10 meters wide and 3 meters high. Luckily I had just brought a new computer as my old one could never have processed it. It was a 4 gig Photoshop file. 40 A0 size pages in total. I didn't think he would download them all through email or print them all out, but he did.

Mark Drew gave me some wallpapering tips as to what glue works best and the best way to glue it to the wall. We struggled with air bubbles and had to peal each sheet off the wall about ten times trying to making the wall papering smooth.

It took about 3 days.

Not bad for two rookies.

Revenge of the sponge. Aaron used that sponge to smooth out the wallpapering. The sound it made was like nails down a chalk board. I had to listen to it all day.