When you become interested in photography, you’re always on the lookout for products that add to your photography process or even enhance it. Fujifilm’s instax instant photo range has been a great help to me in the studio with the curation of my print collections, but the new instax Link WIDE smartphone printer has been able to add value to my print work in a way I hadn’t thought about before and I’m really excited about it.

Hands-on With the instax Link WIDE

I’ll get on that in a minute, but let’s talk about this little print powerhouse first. When I opened the box, I was pleasantly surprised to see how compact the instant printer was despite an increase in size for the larger WIDE prints. The balance of a photographer’s camera bag is always a tightrope. Space and weight are always at a premium when going slightly off the beaten track in landscape photography, so having a printer that was still slim enough to slide into the side pocket of my camera bag (without adding much weight, may I add) is a real win.

Using the printer itself has been a breeze! Transferring my edited images from my shoots (that I captured with my Fujifilm X-T3) to my phone and printing instax versions of my prints using the Link WIDE app is seamless. 

Print Quality

The quality of the prints are very impressive and they reproduce the smaller variations of light in my landscape shots very well. 

It is this quality of print that has allowed me to add another layer of experience for my clients that make the prints feel even more intimate.

And that’s what prints are about, whether you’re capturing a big moment with friends or a view that is blowing you away, capturing the intimacy is what makes us connect when we look at these images. 

When we take photographs, our final product is always a visual one, but it really is just a slither of what draws us to capture that scene in the first place.

For me personally, as a landscape photographer, all the senses are consulted when deciding upon a location for a shoot; sound is surprisingly a big part of my decision. When choosing a location for where a new print is to be born!

From the overwhelming crescendo of the crashing waves during a burly southerly wind to the serenity of a still summer’s afternoon as birds fly back to their nests for an evening’s rest.

Enhancing The Experience Of My Prints

As I touched on earlier, the sounds of a location are what bring a landscape truly to life and incorporating the Fujifilm instax Link WIDE and its QR capabilities have allowed me to transport the minds of my print customers to the moment I experienced and captured out in the field.

Marrying these images with the Link WIDE’s QR code feature for recording sound is amazing. Right now, with thousands of Australians still far from home, it is the little things about Australian life that tug on the heartstring. The Australian landscape, the light and the soundtrack provided by our native birds and animals are things that become engrained in your sense of being Australian. 

 

 

Being able to give the loved ones of my print customers a multi-sensory experience of home is really important and I’m thrilled to be able to do this through the QR code facility on the print.

Print Collection Curation

Another bonus of the printer aside from the ability to add sound to create an experience for my print customers is that a tool like this helps me back in the studio when it comes to curating my collections of prints. 

It makes my life so much easier to see how the photographs I’ve chosen work together as an entire print collection. Pinning them on the wall of my studio really helps me to see how they would also look as print product listings in my online print shop on my website

Final Thoughts

The instax Link WIDE has helped me considerably at the moment of capture, print curation, and providing an immersive final product for my print business. I’m really looking forward to how much more it can expand what experiences I can give my customers in the future!