Hang Up — by Guest Dad Ryan Wright

I take a ton of photos. Even my 4 year old gives me that "don't you dare take another photo of me, dad!" look. I'm obsessive, I realize.

In the new house, I want photos to be the focal artwork on our walls. I'm not sure exactly how to accomplish this. I don't want the walls to feel cluttered. Here are a few ideas I have... anything you could add would be helpful.

I want to do one large wall with a ton of pictures grouped together, all different sizes in thin black frames, cascading from the center outward. My inspiration is a wall I saw in Barney's last year... I took a photograph of it (left).

This way I could use a lot of photos in one dramatic setting.

Should they all be black & white? Or do you like the color?

I would also like to group 3 large square black and white photos together, each of one of my kids in thin black frames. These could go in the family room or hallway. I'm thinking of these 3 photos below: In the dining room, I'd like to lean one extra-large photo against the wall, sitting on top of our long, low tibetan chest. Thinking of this one (again, b&w or color??):


I would also like to put a shot of each kid in their own bedroom. Ella's photo would be one large photo: For Jack, I'm thinking of doing 4 different effects of the same photo in a line, each in an individual black square frame: For Max's room, a close-up head shot...

The idea of all this is to use our photos to personalize our home as the art on our walls.

I saw this photo on Apartment Therapy recently and loved it. I like the idea of old photos lined up like this. Between Erin & I we have 13 siblings... maybe place old photos of each of them like this? We have one very long wall in the basement...

PRINTING The best place I've found for high quality large-scale hi-fi color prints is called Pictopia. You email them a digital image file and in a few days they mail back a magnificently large, utterly crisp, remarkably stable, frameable print.

The sizes range from small up to a giant 4 feet by 10 feet! And compared to other processes for making large images, their prices are cheap.
Another way I've used to display photos is to print them in a photo book. And rather than arranging various pics on each page, like a scrap book, I use one photo to take up the entire page, like a coffee-table book. It's a stunning effect.

The past few years we have used Shutterfly.com and iPhoto to create books for ourselves and our family. If you need more than 100 pages, try Blurb. It also has so many options and is easy to load and arrange, and prints up to 400 pages.