subscribe 0330 333 1113 I http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk I 6 July 2019 23
the prints now and then, always
trying to stay mindful of his market
while not undermining the value of
the work. ‘It’s quite tricky because
some images are harder to come by
than others, so I want the price to
reflect that,’ he explains. ‘But equally,
your value of an image might be
quite different from someone who
hasn’t the same attachment to it.’
His prints start at £40 for a
mounted A4 image, going up to
the £400 mark for an A1-framed
print. Anything up to A3+ he prints
himself, while larger orders are
done externally. In the middle
are the prints that sell for around
£200-250. He tends not to produce
many limited editions. He’s also
found it’s definitely a case of bigger
being better. At the outset, his stock
was around half loose prints at A3
and A4, while the other half were
the larger, framed images. Now, just
over a year on, he says it’s about
80:20 in favour of the big pictures.
‘They have more impact,’ Stuart
says. ‘Although I’ll often have a
smaller print of most images, once
the customer has seen the framed
print they don’t want the little one.’Popular prints
While it’s still the classic views of
the Lake District that sell best, as
tourists tend to want a memento of
something they’ve seen themselves
while on holiday, his runaway
bestseller is actually of a viewpoint
that only serious fell walkers tend
to come across. ‘It’s of the view
towards Buttermere from
Warnscale Bothy,’ he says. ‘The
number of people who buy that
image who’ve never been to the
bothy surprises me, but it outsells
everything else in the gallery by
two or three to one.’
What has also surprised him is
the enormous popularity of thepanoramic format, and these
‘comfortably’ outsell any image in
the more conventional formats.
‘That’s the thing that’s surprised me
most since opening the gallery,’ he
reveals. ‘I think it’s because the
panoramic format lends itself to
filling walls. Before I opened the
shop, they were something I did as
an afterthought, but now when I go
out, I’m always looking for them.’
Despite it being such early days,
Stuart is already looking to the
future. In the quieter periods, he
plans to increase the number of
residential workshops he already
runs, and hopes eventually to be
in the position to move to a larger
premises, at which point he’ll
start selling work by other
photographers. ‘But for the time
being, it’s a case of getting myself
established and making the
business profitable. It’s going
as well as I could have hoped.’Stuart McGlennon
started taking pictures
only four years ago, while
he was still working at
Sellafield as a health and
safety officer. With shift
work becoming taxing,
he grabbed the chance to
take on a gallery space in
Keswick, which opened
as Lens District about
a year ago. Visit http://www.
lensdistrict.com.