I love printing. It's the true final step in making the image we first saw in our head, long before the camera was ever mounted to the tripod. Every choice out in the field — the light, the angle, the moment we pressed the shutter — was really just gathering the raw material for this last stage. Until a photograph is printed, it's still unfinished. A file on a hard drive isn't a photograph yet; it's a promise of one.
A screen can't hold up its end of that promise. However good your monitor is, you're looking at light passing through glass, the same glass showing you a hundred other things an hour later — an email, a video, a stranger's vacation photos. It disappears the moment you look away. A print doesn't do that. It hangs on a wall and just sits there, quietly, for years. People walk past it, stop, come back to it again. That's the only way anyone really gets to spend time with an image, and it's the only way I know of to let someone else feel even a little of what I felt standing there with the camera.
For me, the print itself still isn't the finish line. I mount every piece myself onto archival board and cut the mat by hand — for most of my work, a simple white mount and mat, done the old way, with dry mounting. I trim carefully for the best perspective, then assemble the mounted print, the finished mat, the glass, and a handmade frame. There's something I like about doing this part myself instead of sending it off to a lab — it means the same hands that were on the camera in the field are the ones putting the piece together at the end.
The signature is the last thing that goes on, and it means something specific to me — it's not decoration, it's my approval. It says I looked at this finished piece, held it, and it matches what I saw when I made it. That's not something a digital file on your phone can ever really carry. When you buy a print from me, you're not buying a copy of an image — you're buying the one object I actually finished and stood behind.