Tejus commented, “You can see that the lines on the Peugeot in the top frame are far crisper and sharper.” And in his conclusion he said, “The details that made the picture interesting are simply lost in commodity printing.”

Virtual Photography Studio focuses on advanced amateur and part time professional photographers who want to make photography their career.  It’s run by a husband and wife team who created a successful online photography business. They try to help others achieve that goal with tips, articles, coaching, books, a blog and other resources.

A recent blog post focused on “5 Cool Ways To Make Your Photography Stand Out From The Competition.” fotoflōt is one of the ways. The post focuses on fotoflōt’s ability to show every single pixel in the photographers original image, without the 1/8″ loss that typically occurs on most large size prints.

Reid makes a couple good points in his first sentence: “I have been looking for a way to display my HDR photos for quite some time now, and I think I’ve finally found a way. Framing has always been too expensive, especially when I have an odd sized picture… it worked alright for a normal photograph, but I was a little worried about putting an HDR behind glass.”

Reid’s first point about HDRs (High Dynamic Range Photos) is right on. Every photo is compromised by glare and reflections when framed behind glass, but this is especially true for HDR photos, which often have an especially rich range of colors and tones.

His second point hits on the fact that framing often isn’t an option - or is an expensive one - for “non-standard” sizes. For example, Reid’s fotoflōt is 7.5″x15″, which is a 1:2 aspect ratio, or proportion. Most framing shops don’t offer 1:2 proportion frames, or else offer them as a custom size. The same goes for the many other panoramic sizes offered by fotoflōt. And if you’re buying your mounted photo from an online service, shipping can get expensive with all the glass and wood.

In contrast, fotoflōts consist of light-weight acrylic and mounting bracket. You can read all of Reid’s blog post here.

Stephen Zeller is a portrait photographer with a primary focus on families and children. He’s a customer of the online photo service Zenfolio. He recently won a Zenfolio contest and was awarded a fotoflōt.

Stephen had never heard of fotoflōt before, but after he got his product he says, “If you’re in the market for a cool way to display your art, I highly recommend you take a look at the products from fotoflōt!”

Take a look at his complete blog post.

If you’re a fotoflōt owner, join the fan group and post a photo of your fotoflōt in its native habitat. And spread the word about fotoflōt in other online groups or bookmarking sites like digg and StumbleUpon.

A few weeks ago, we came across a blog post on Antique Mommy about the cool things you can do with Google’s Picasa photo editing software. Since we’re a Picasa Print Provider - making it super easy for Picasa users to flōt their photos - we told her about fotoflōt because we thought she and her readers might be interested. After flōting one of her photos, she got VERY interested and wrote this.

And he was delighted with the image. “The print is just fantastic. This image doesn’t do the real thing justice, but I am totally happy with the detail and clarity of the print:”

Read the whole story in his Dgrin.com forum entry here.

We’re fortunate to have customers who like their fotoflōts, and Kelly Morgan is one of them. Here is one of the pictures he fotoflōted.

The one thing we couldn’t do - because of Christmas rush delays - was to get him the fotoflōts before Christmas.

But Kelly liked everything else, and emailed Jürgen with the following feedback:

Unfortunately, due to no fault of your own, the only thing I received in time for xmas was the desk-stand. That was a major bummer. However, the day after xmas I was thrilled to get a look at my fotofloted images.

I expected quite a bit and I was not let down in the least. The images were sharp and the colors true. My biggest fear was that something would be lost in translation between the calibration of my monitor and the fotoflot printers. My worries were unfounded as the prints were returned to me as good or better than I sent them to you. What you were able to do to the night shot with the blurry stars went far beyond good customer service.

Everything - from the communication on retouches, to the safe packaging, to the final fotoflot product - was impressive. And I love the desk-stand option, as well as all the different size options for the wall mounts.

Seriously, Jurgen, I couldn’t wait to find something to criticize, but it just didn’t happen. No scratches. No poor exposures. No BS. Just a great product. Just great customer service. Just a tremendous value.

Andy posted an entry on Dgrin, the SmugMug forum, describing his overall experience with ordering, packaging and of course the fotoflōts themselves. Go here to see his complete post. The end result in his office is shown below: