Photos of Wood, Printed on Wood

When I'm here, I'm a guy who shares his love of bourbon, american whiskey and other spirits in their many forms. Whether that is drinking, cooking, tasting, visiting, touring or just thinking about them doesn't really matter much. But when I'm not here, I do other things.

I'm a designer during the day. I make the things that most sane people actively try to ignore (advertising, in it's many forms) hence the drinking. I kid...mostly.

I'm a builder of pretty furniture-type things when my wife insists. 

I'm a photographer when the spirit moves me. I even have another site (yellowswanphoto.com) where I keep the photo blog I've been keeping for...wow...almost five years now. 

And it's my love of photography (and the many power tools I own) that made me want to try doing something a little different with their presentation. I found this blog post while trolling through the interwebs (How to Transfer Prints to Wood) and was immediately struck with the desire to try it myself. Unlike what the author of the post said, I prefer doing my black and white prints on a color laser printer as it has a bit more fine detail and the reddish color that results is a pretty good match for the wood tones with no need for staining the wood after. 

After searching for a suitable test photo, I landed on a couple of my favorites from my Bourbon Trail vacation in 2011. I mean they are photos of wood, printed on wood. It just made too much sense.

 

This is a photo taken in the Wild Turkey Distillery's bottle filling facility. 

You'd never guess it, but this was taken while visiting the Woodford Reserve distillery last year. Or maybe you would guess it.

These photos were each transferred to a 1"x6" pine board picked up at my local Home Depot that I then cut down to 4.5" tall. Be aware if you try this yourself, if you aren't careful with putting on a smooth layer of glue, you get places where the photo just won't transfer which is much more awesomely random than trying to distress it after the fact. I had others that were perfect...and boring.

So yes, even though this is only tangentially related to bourbon or whiskey, I felt it might be of interest to those who had an interest in bourbon. And heck it's my blog anyway.