"My frame of reference is always print"

For photographer, educator and Canon Ambassador Ahmet Polat, prints are not just an end result – they are a key step in the creative process.

"The medium of paper does something to you neurologically," he suggests. "On screen, everything is equal, but in print you realise which images you find valuable and which you don't. Print gives you a different understanding. It helps you make better decisions.

"I always say to my students, take it off your screen. Print it out. Move your prints around. You need to know what two images mean when they lie side-by-side. That's how you edit. That's how you tell the story. You need to make the process physical to understand what you're looking at."

Ahmet practises in a range of media including photography, film, and theatre, and was Creative Director for Vogue Turkey. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at prestigious institutions such as the Istanbul Modern, the Rijksmuseum, and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. He has also curated celebrated exhibitions at Foam, Amsterdam's photography museum, where he's applied his philosophy: "great photography needs really good prints."

Ahmet learned printing in the traditional darkroom and says he loves "the analogue language of film. Film has light-sensitive particles stacked in an organic way," he elaborates. "When you work in a darkroom, if you look closely, you see a depth in the grain, a layering. Print technology flattened this, with only one layer of ink – it was very sharp, but very flat. What I'm looking for is that depth in a print."

He has found this depth of tone, he says, in prints made with the Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-1100. The printer's new-generation LUCIA PRO II inks use pigments with low reflectance and increased coverage, enabling deeper reproduction of blacks on fine art media. This doesn't mean simply darker blacks, but smoother and truer gradations of tone in dark as well as light areas. In addition, Canon's unique Chroma Optimiser coating evens-out reflectivity and prevents bronzing, the pseudo-metallic sheen that black-and-white prints in particular could suffer from.

Another recent project, Ahmet reports, presented some challenges, "but this printer gave me a solution that I never considered would be possible." Ahmet was commissioned to document the first-ever Citizens' Assembly in the Netherlands, involving 175 people drawn from around the country to discuss climate change and continuing over three months. Ahmet's photos were not to be PR or press images but historic documentation of the participants and the process, and "also feed back into the process of deliberation, helping people reflect on it." The major challenge was that because of official regulations, the use of cloud storage and sharing was not permitted, only physical copies.

As a result, Ahmet explains, "I had to produce 175 portraits within three days. I took photographs of small groups and printed them out within just a few hours and immediately put them back into the process of the deliberation. And they were amazed as well – how did I do that? These were A4-size, museum-quality, archival prints, not instant-print snaps."

Ahmet says the imagePROGRAF PRO-1100 made the workflow so easy, producing very high quality prints very quickly. As a bonus, thanks to the printer's Silent Mode, the process was remarkably quiet.

"For any photographer, time is money. With the imagePROGRAF PRO-1100, I don't have to spend too much time figuring out the controls." Operation and setup are easy, with on-screen prompts for configuring the printer and connecting it to devices. Ahmet also found the output quality completely reliable – "no ink spots or any flaws, no waste. What you feel with this printer is a sense of trust."

For Ahmet, this is reinforced by using Canon's print software, Professional Print & Layout (PPL). "It adds a lot of value to the process," he declares. "It gives you more control. You want to get what you see on-screen, not waste the material or the time guessing – that creates mistrust. You want an easy way to interact with the printer and make sure the outcome is exactly what you expected it to be."

After producing a print, the next step is to ensure that viewers experience it as you intended. "Lighting can make or break the depth and tone of a photograph," says Ahmet. "I think of the light as part of the composition itself." Drawing on his experience of mounting and curating exhibitions, here are some tips on lighting your prints for display.

Lighting isn't just about enhancing the visual appeal of a print – preserving it is a crucial consideration. Prints produced using the Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-1100 are designed to resist light damage for up to 200 years ¹ , but the wrong lighting will dramatically shorten the life of even the best prints. Always avoid direct sunlight, even if it strikes the print for only short periods during the day – its high levels of UV will cause fading (and even UV-filtering glass won't prevent this completely). Fluorescent lights also emit high levels of UV, while halogen bulbs produce damaging heat (infrared). Indirect, diffused natural light is great but will vary with the time of day and weather conditions, altering the viewer's perception of colour and tone. LED lights are an ideal solution – they emit minimal heat or UV, are energy-efficient, and are available in a range of intensities and colour temperatures.

Light quality is how hard or soft the light is. For viewing photo prints, diffuse light is better than hard and direct, and the ideal is an even spread of light over the whole print, not leaving edges in shadow. The best intensity (which with LED lights is measured in lumens rather than watts) depends on how far away the light source is, but the principle is the same as in photography: too much light (overexposure) washes out details, while too little makes details hard to see.

Experts agree that for comfortable viewing, prints should be mounted so that the centre of the image is at approximately eye-height (on average about 168cm above the floor), with lighting pointed at its centre but illuminating the whole print evenly. "It's important for the print’s longevity to have the right light and not too much heat," Ahmet adds. "Proper lighting can help preserve the quality and life of the print."

Galleries prefer accent lighting (directed at the print) rather than just ambient, and the consensus is that a light striking the print at an angle of about 30° from vertical is ideal for avoiding glare. You can get anti-glare glass, but this introduces its own texture and alters the viewer's experience of the print. Ahmet prefers not to use any glass or even a frame, and favours papers with a satin finish such as the 260gsm Canon Pro Luster, which is available up to A2 size and resembles traditional resin-coated papers used in darkrooms. This is ideal for use with the imagePROGRAF PRO-1100, which supports borderless printing up to A2 size, with Canon's Chroma Optimiser coating ensuring less reflectivity and less variance within areas of a tone.

Colour temperature affects perception and can fundamentally alter the mood and aesthetic of a print. Warm lighting will accentuate reds and yellows but mute blues, which is wrong for a seascape, for example. To let the print speak for itself, the optimum colour temperature for accent lights is between 3,000K and 4,000K on the Kelvin scale, which is slightly warmer than midday sunlight. Bulbs in the 2,000K to 3,000K range emit "warm white" or even yellowish light; bulbs of 4,600K to 6,500K produce very crisp, often blue-tinged light. Fluorescent lights produce an interrupted spectrum of light with a greenish tinge – another reason to avoid them.

Professional LED lights may come with a CRI (colour rendering index) rating. The CRI scale (0-100) measures how accurately a light source renders eight specific colours as compared with natural sunlight. The higher the CRI number, the better – look for 85 or more, and 95 if you can get it. You may see a separate rating for CRI R9, which measures how accurately the light source renders deep red colours. These colours are not included in the standard CRI scale, and a high CRI R9 number is worth looking for if your prints contain a lot of red.

"I‘m always aware of the context of where I put my work, and I will change the lighting for my work,“ Ahmet explains. "Each space has its own energy, its own light quality," he concludes, "but the standard is my studio, which is a neutral grey, so I know exactly what I'm printing, and then I adjust the location – whether it's a gallery or a museum or people's homes – and even tell them to put a different light on it, to make sure the image resonates as it should."