SNAFU - At my work

So....my employer found out about my interest in photography and offered to print some enlargements of my photos and display them on the walls here at work. What a nice gesture, so I thought. They offered to cover all the costs of printing and framing and even take care of all the legwork if I supplied them with the digital images. Well let me tell you, it became an example of, if you want something done right, do it yourself. The color was extremely saturated to the point of looking unnatural to me, and the print was grainy, almost pixelated. So, first off I checked the math. Sure enough my camera should handle producing an 11x14 enlargement at nearly 300dpi straight up without any fancy photoshop tricks. And the color, what happened to the color? Yellows look orange and the greens are so deep they loose contrast with the shadows. At work I have a high res 13x21 inch monitor and I can blow the photo up to double the monitor size and it still looks sharp and has the natural looking color I remember seeing the day I took it.

Ironically, or maybe not so, the people I work with that have seen the photos think they are great. They like the color, they like the detail. So maybe being the artist that took the photos, I had a look in my mind I was going for, the originals echo that look, and thus my opinion of the prints made for the office is maybe biased by that. After all art is an interpretive and individual subject, what one person casually notices speaks deeply to another. And so I have decided to leave my personal disappointment in the look of these prints behind me, and look on the bright side. The bright side being I was able to capture images that now bring enjoyment to others.