>>2979400It's not hard to get an image to appear crisp on a screen, there are even cell photo photos that look fabulous when viewed on a small screen. I don't do a whole lot of crazy sharpening for large prints because I have the large formats, but even smaller formats can print well if sharpened with skill. Of course, eventually everything runs out of detail once you scale it up enough and no amount of sharpening will save the day. As others suggested, using a tripod, cable release and all the necessary technique to make sure there is no camera movement is a huge part of it. Selecting an aperture that is appropriate for the format to prevent diffusion is also important.
Lens movements are also a huge help, you can get the foreground and background in relatively good focus with the lens wide open, and then stop down to f22 or so to get the middle ground in focus. On a big format like 4x5, f22 doesn't really cause any diffraction and does pretty well.
>>2979631Thank you. My black and white work sell a bit differently as I only sell handmade prints. My current darkroom limits size of those up to 16x20 and even those are a pain. I typically only sell contact 4x5's at a real bargain price as an "insurance policy" at my shows to at least make some money. Sometimes someone buys an 8x10" print but I rarely even seem to sell 11x14's and no one asks about big stuff with black and white. In my experience, people seem to be looking for groupings of two or three small images with black and white but that might just be me.
I've been working on a prototype of a darkroom print done directly onto brushed stainless steel using a liquid emulsion. I finally got it to work and have just ordered more metal so I have some winter projects to do. Not sure how I want to present them yet but this is one idea, they are really complicated to make so it will likely be a higher end price point. Currently I'm planning on making them as contact prints and 11x14ish sizes.
