Borders or No Borders?

Lake Erie #10, Landscape Photography, 11×14 inches in a 16×20 Frame

We’ve been busy doing lots of work behind the scenes over here! We’re scrutinizing many aspects of how we run our studio and revamping our processes to make you and us even happier campers.

One of the questions that comes up time and time again is about the white border we leave around our prints. Currently all fine art prints that ship from our studio have a white border around them where I print the title of the Photograph, add my signature, and if it’s a limited edition I’ll write in the print number.

The white border that we use is not some willy-nilly size that we chose just because it looked nice, no indeed. We actually researched the common window sizes of pre-cut store bought mats then made my photographs fit nicely within them. If you’ve ever seen one of my prints matted you’ll notice that between the image and the window there’s a thin white border before the photograph starts giving it a nice, professional look. No need to hide any of the art behind a mat.

We’ve had some inquiries about printing images larger on the page, sometimes even eliminating the border all together. This is something we may consider for our Open Edition photographs but I’d like to leave the border on our Limited Edition prints so they can be numbered on the front.

So what are your thoughts? What do you think about white borders? Should they stay or should they go?