Personal Development

One of the nicest things about working in a business like DIY Framing is seeing the difference that we make to people we deal with. This week, during Focus on imaging there were a couple of occasions when I had first hand experience of this.

Back in January we ran an Art and Photography Framing weekend, it was the subject of the first two blogs.  On that course was a nice lady called Heather, she was enjoying herself immensely (except when it came to cutting glass which I don’t think she enjoyed at all).  Heather’s husband is a photographer and her plan was to frame his pictures.  Here we are now, little more than two months later and what Heather is actually doing is running a small framing business!  Located in a market in what was once a branch of Woolworths, she and her husband Alistair have a stall where they are selling frames and taking on other bespoke framing work, specialising in various hand finished techniques like spaced double mounts and mouldings with paint and wax finishes.  These are early days, the stall has only just opened but the fact is that Heather’s enthusiasm for framing following her weekend spent here in High Wycombe has launched her into a completely new venture that she had not really thought about before.  I didn’t really have anything to do with her training, I was there and I helped out but Linnette did the teaching, still I feel a sense of responsibility for what Heather has embarked on and am really chuffed she is making a go of it.

The second tale was of a chap called David Looker, he was on the course we ran in Manchester in early February. David is a keen photographer himself and has embarked on working through the distinctions process of the Royal Photographic Society. The RPS, along with nearly all Photographic clubs has a guide to the correct presentation of the images that are to be judged. The RPS guidelines are actually vague in some respects, a maximum height of 23” and that the prints should support themselves.  However the vast majority of applicants adhere to the unwritten ‘norm’ as used by most camera clubs; which is that the mounts will be 16” by 20” in white or cream.  The way we teach mounting will exceed the requirements of the RPS – so if you mount the way you have learned from us there is not likely to be any marking down for presentation!  Back to David, he came to Focus to ask the RPS if his work was correctly mounted to submit: suffice it to say, since he had used the method we taught him his mounts were perfect for the job, we wish him all the best when his work goes before the judging panel.

This ongoing contact we have with customers highlights their personal development, often the type of products they buy shows a growing complexity in the type of work they are doing, sometimes the volume of products they buy shows that their framing is taking off. Whatever the circumstances, seeing our work pay off in this way fills me with great satisfaction, even though my involvement is somewhat tenuous.