Fotoflot combines magnets and acrylic to make it appear that your print is floating on the wall.

A little while ago at a gallery show by photographer Andrew Darlow that included several prints he made on stretched canvas, Andrew remarked that visitors seemed more excited by his canvas work than the images under glass. Part of the reason for the excitement for the canvas prints was, of course, that they were printed at much larger sizes than the works under glass but the other reason was, there was no glass.

I was thinking about this recently while trying out a new printing service called fotoflot. Fotoflot (pronounced foto-FLOAT) turns your images into display prints that are mounted and then laser-trimmed onto an 1/8-inch thick acrylic panel so you can hang them on the wall without needing to put glass in front. The result is less painterly than printing on canvas but it does create a similar in-your-face relationship between the viewer and the photograph—no glass that can create reflections or glare, just the images right there in front of you.

The service is Web-based so to get started you first need to upload a photo to the fotoflot Web site. The site, unfortunately, only accepts JPEGS and Tiffs.

Otherwise though, I found the fotoflot site and the process of uploading and sizing images for printing to be extremely simple and easy to use. Obviously a lot of thought went into making the Web service as user-friendly as possible and it shows. Within minutes I had uploaded a black-and- white landscape photo I shot in Arizona last summer, sized it for a 15 x 22.5-inch print ($150) and checked out. Only a few days later, the Fotoflot print arrived in a sturdy cardboard box with some basic instructions on how to mount (aka "float") it on the wall.

The quality of the print was a lot better than I had expected and I was pleased that fotoflot was able to maintain the subtle details in the shadow areas of my black-and-white image. On its Web site, fotoflot notes that it converts black-and-white images directly into the 36-bit color space used by its Durst Theta 51 print processor to maintain gray tones in the image, rather than reducing it to 256 gray tones by converting it into sRGB or Adobe RGB. That attention to detail definitely showed in the top-notch quality of my black-and-white print. (Fotoflot also prints in color.)

Fotoflot does not apply any laminate or spray to print surface to increase longevity because the company feels it will affect brightness, sharpness and saturation. All images are printed on Fuji Crystal Archive Professional paper which is one of the more durable substrates on the market.

Mounting the final acrylic print on the wall was a little trickier than I had hoped though. This was mostly because the metal mounting bracket the fotoflot print uses for 15 x 20 inches and larger sizes requires that four screws be drilled into the wall. I also found that the metal bracket quickly scuffed the wall which wasn't a problem once the print was up—the scuff marks became hidden—but could be a problem if you ever decide to remove the print.

The good thing is that the acrylic panel on back of the print attaches to the metal bracket with four small magnets which help it "float" off the wall. Along with looking sharp, the magnet system makes it easy to change fotoflot prints. If you ever get tired of the one you have up, just pull it off the magnets and swap a new one in.



THE BOTTOM LINE

Though it doesn't quite produce the painting-like effect of having a photo mounted on stretched canvas, foto-flot's unique acrylic print service is a good way to smash the glass between viewer and image. Though amateurs will certainly find fotoflot appealing, there are applications for professionals as well, either to hang in a gallery show or to sell as a specialty print.

fotoflot www.fotoflot.com

Pros: A unique way to show off photos without having to hang them behind glass; black-and-white print quality exceptional. Cons: Only accepts JPEGs and Tiffs; metal mounting bracket scuffs the wall. Price: $150 for 15 x 20-inch print (pricing varies by size)