Landscape, That $30 canvas you describe, what size would that be?
Also, i have a feeling these metal prints are a fad and will lose favor soon. They are interesting and glossy but feel cold. Now that all the Wedding photographers are pushing metal prints, their uniqueness will diminish.
Let's say 20x40. Here are the numbers to run them real quick.
So to make this canvas, you would need 4 feet. (Canvas size would be 24"x44", so lets round up to 48" since you will never get to use the whole roll). Lets say this canvas is $100 for a 40 foot roll (actually $98 at IT Supplies if it is Epson Exhibition Matte). So that's $10 in canvas.
Next comes ink. This depends on the image of course, and can be anywhere around 6-10ml. Lets use 10ml to play it safe. A 300ml cart costs $140, so lets say 50 cents per ml. This comes out to $5 in ink.
Next is coating. It runs about $100 per gallon, and honestly, I'm not sure how much of the stuff I use, but let me just be generous with the quantity and call it 50ml for several coats. Working this out, and even rounding up, lets call it under $2 for the liquid lamination. (time is of course not included in any of these calculations... we are just going with fixed costs, and you of course already need to have the spray gun).
So to make the canvas, we've got $10 + $5 + $2 = $17
Next we got stretcher bars. I have no idea what others pay, but lets say roughly $1 per foot. We need 120 inches (20+20+40+40), so that is 10 feet exactly, but of course there are losses here too, so lets call this $12 instead of $10 which it would be for exactly 10 feet.
Next I use black tape along the edges. Once again, we need 10 feet of this stuff. A 60 foot roll costs about $30, so that's 50 cents per foot, so $5 for tape.
Lastly, some wire, 2 D rings, and 2 screws... certainly less than $1.
So we got $17 + $12 + $1 = $30
OMG... I wasn't even trying to hit this number, it was just a ball part figure. With canvas, there will of course be some waste. If you are printing a gradient sky and get a nasty cotton seed right in the middle, you might have to trash that piece... so there is a good $15 gone easily. But as you can see, using just fixed costs, and I did round up even, you can produce a stretched canvas yourself for a fairly cheap rate. If you do gallery wrap, its the same amount of canvas, and just a little more ink, but you're saving on the tape, so this is a bonus and can in fact be cheaper. I personally like using black tape because I hate the mirror edge look, its hard to line up when stretching, and the corners get damaged too easily. Oh... I forgot the cost of staples. Hmmmm... 5000 cost about $15, and I use maybe 50 per canvas, so that works out to 15 cents for staples.
Anyway... now price out a metallic print that someone else has to do in the 20x40 size and you find you cannot get anywhere close to this, and I would guess easily over $100.
For a little more money, you can do what bill t. does, which is to mount the canvas onto gator and pop it into a frame. These days, they make pretty cheap moulding, gorgeous 3"-4" moulding, and although this is I'm sure in the neighborhood of $5, if not more per foot, the finished product of mounted canvas in a nice frame is classy. You do need more specialized equipment to make decent frames I think, whereas making your stretcher bars can be kind of rough since nobody sees the edges, but it can still be done at home.
Now of course with a metal print, you just pick it up, or even get it shipped to you, so there is no work involved. But it seems like in order to make any money selling photography, you essentially do have to hire yourself to do the work and you pay yourself a certain amount of labor. I'm happy making $25 or $30 an hour doing it myself and keeping that money. If it takes me 2 hours to make the stretched canvas, which cost me $30 in material costs, it means I'm making $70 extra, using the metal print example if I was to pay $100 for someone else to make it. So if I now sell this wholesale to the store for $200, my profit on the stretched canvas is $170 versus only $100.
Now don't get me wrong, if I was selling 20 pieces a week, I'd happily have someone else do it and collect $100 on each of those 20 pieces because I would hate to have to produce 20 a week myself. But if I'm only selling 1 or 2, I simply cannot afford to pay someone else to do the work. I need to keep every dollar.
As an aside, when selling just paper prints, its amazing how these go for even less than what you'd pay a high end place to print up. They typically charge $10 per square foot to print on luster, but when I sell small pieces wholesale, your standard prints to tourists, I'm only able to charge about this exact same rate. So what's really going on is that I'm using my photography to run a print shop. It just so happens that my pictures are being sold, but all I'm doing is making money on selling the ink and paper. But that's a whole other discussion.
EDIT: Opppps.. forgot to add in the tape actually. It should be $17 + $12 +$5 +1 = $35... but still in the ballpark.
