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Online Photo Printing Recommendation

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AdormaPix - my recommendation for online print servicesIf you are a little more serious about your photographic prints these days like I am, you will want a photo printing company that is a cut above the rest. "The Rest" is a crowded group - it seems that everyone is trying to get you to use them for your online prints: Shutterfly, Snapfish, Flickr, Kodak, Costco, Target...and the list goes on.

When it comes to printing my photos, the very first thing I look for is a print service that prints from tiff files. If you're a serious photographer you won't want to be printing from jpeg files as this is a compressed file format that discards a lot of your image information. Remember that the jpeg file format was devleoped for displaying images on the web in the days of 8kb dialup modem days. Sure, its fine for your 7x5 snapshots, but when you want to go to the next level in both image quality and size, you will not be printing from jpeg files. So if you're using a service that only accepts jpeg files, move on, I say.

The next thing I look for is a print service that provides a good selection of quality archival papers. You want to be able to choose a paper type that compliments the photo you are printing. If it's an artsy image with colors that are "grungy", then you will want to print on a paper that has some texture and isn't too shiny. But if you have a colorful image that you want to pop, then you'll probably want to print it on something that has good reflective qualities.

Next, you want an online photo print service who has a user-friendly website for uploading and ordering your prints. And since you will be printing from tiff files, you will want a site that offers a reasonable amount of free storage space, and that will accept quite large files.

And last, but by no means least, you want a print service that offers exceptional service. Timely turnaround, and packaging that gets the prints to you in great shape.

Over the years I have tried several online photo printing services, and I am happy that about a year ago I found the equivalent of "Nirvana" in online photographic printing. And that's New York City's Adorama photo lab known as AdoramaPix. I use them all the time for my printing now and they are just exceptional in all the qualities I listed above.

They use Kodak papers exclusively and I recommend that you try the Kodak "metallic" paper for any prints that are colorful and which you want to really jump off the paper. I have almost all my prints done on the metallic paper. You'll be astounded by its glass-like sheen.

Use this link to the AdoramaPix website and place just one order and I'm sure you'll be hooked too. From time to time they have excellent sales too. And while you're there, be sure to check out all the great camera stuff at Adorama.com too.
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Samoan Youth

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This young man was preparing with his friends for his moment of fame on the stage at the Samoan Village at the Polynesian dance festival called Pasifika in Auckland in March this year. Samoan Youth Canon EOS 20D 1/30sec at f/20 ISO 200 Canon 70-300mm lens at 300mm
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Before and After: Two Joshua Tree Photographs, Two Painterly Reworkings

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I want to try something a little different in this post — a working walk-through of how two of my Joshua Tree photographs from April of 2011 became two of my newest painterly artworks on Redbubble. Same compositions, same landscape, same afternoon in the Mojave. Very different final pieces. The Raw Photographs Both photographs were taken on a single afternoon trip to Joshua Tree National Park, shot in Canon raw (.CR2) format on my Canon EOS. Raw files are, as any photographer knows, deliberately flat — they carry the maximum amount of information the sensor recorded, without any of the punchy contrast, saturation, or sharpening that a JPEG would apply automatically in-camera. That flatness is a feature: it gives the photographer the widest possible latitude to make choices in post-processing. But it also means a raw file, straight out of the camera, doesn't look like the scene the eye remembers. It looks like the scene the sensor saw, drained of atmosphere. Here are the two r...
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Cool Granny in Her Austin A35 — © John Corney 2026 This one has a real backstory, and I'd like to tell it properly. An Auckland Sighting On one of my annual visits home to New Zealand, I was walking through central Auckland — at the corner of Queen Street and Karangahape Road (K Road, as everyone calls it) — when a small yellow car went past me and stopped me mid-stride. It was a beautifully kept Austin A35, one of the little British runabouts that were everywhere in New Zealand when I was growing up in the fifties and sixties. Driving it was a woman of a certain age with the confident bearing of someone who had been driving that same car, or one like it, for decades. She looked entirely at home behind the wheel. She belonged to the car and the car belonged to her, and neither of them was in any hurry to change. If you know Auckland, that particular corner will register: Queen Stree...
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