I actually started out as a website designer and then took up photography as a hobby as web design wasn’t giving me the creative freedom that I wanted. I have mainly shot with a Canon 20D and have quite a varied collection of images. My colleagues are mostly from fine art backgrounds and I went to college with a couple of them. Running our own company is very time consuming and unfortunately doesn’t leave as much time for my own photography as I would have liked. On the the plus side you get to see some spectacular images from professional photographers.

I setup Point101 because I wanted to be involved with something that enveloped my passion for imagery. Initially we started out selling fine art photography reproductions in small edition sizes but unfortunately because we weren’t established enough, it wasn’t enough to sustain us so we decided to concentrate more on a print service rather than on on demand print gallery. We are hoping to start to move back towards our original goal in the coming months as we’ve now been established for a number of years and have access to some great portfolios of images. We’ve like to showcase some really exciting photographers in the future.

Well firstly we all love photography – which I think is important so you can relate to the products you’re selling and you have a vision to move the company forward. Then there is the price we offer our prints at – they are very competitively priced – without us compromising on quality or service. In fact we print at 1440 dpi which is twice what most large format printers go with (as they save half the ink costs!). Finally we believe we have the most intuitive upload system and virtual preview of any large format printer. We’ve spent a lot of time developing the current website and we believe it helps our professional photographers make their purchasing quicker and easier.

The whole ordering process was designed from scratch and took over a year to develop. We wanted to give photographers a clear and accurate preview of their images, with the ability to upload large files and position, crop and rotate these files on the fly with instant previews of how their images would look framed, on canvas or as a giclee print product. We worked closely with our in-house web design team to get this as intuitive and easy to use as possible and we hope we’ve achieved this.

Yes this has effected us. Certainly it was more of a delayed effect and hit us early this year, in the first quarter of 2010 – where we should have been growing as a company we were losing sales. However, its picked up now and we feel our continued effort to provide great customer service and quality products will hold us in good stead. Everyone in the industry is trying to be upbeat and I think that photography is so involved in our every day lives that people will always want to share their memories and creative projects with each other, so there will always be a demand for print services.

We’ve just recently launched our Giclee Prints which photographers have been asking us for for ages! They are finally up on our website now and we offer prints on 3 gorgeous paper types – Illford Pearl, Fotospeed Matt and Hahnemuhle Photo Rag. We’ll also be launching our Perspex Prints soon and our Exclusive Prints will be launching later in the year with a selection of photographers work for sale.

We started off selling a higher percentage of prints direct to the public but we now focus our energies on trade services and offer a complete service to professional photographers. We can offer bespoke services such as unbranded prints and trade discounts for larger orders and we feel that photographers like this kind of efficient service they can rely on.

Our canvas prints are popular in our medium and large sizes as well as our panoramic range. Although our Switchframes are proving quite a hit as they are an affordable product for photographers as many of their clients – especially weddings – want a simple and contemporary frame and print at a low cost.

This is a feature that many of our customers love and yes it was our idea. It was the main feature on our old website that was launched about 5 years ago. It has actually been copied by many other printers and designers since then – some of whom actually directly copied the code from our site – which we are pursuing legally. Its frustrating in some ways but inspired us to create the fantastic and improved website we have now.

Yes we’ve had some funny images and some we couldn’t mention! We have one customer who seems to be some sort of guru or spiritual life coach and all his prints are of him standing, pointing and smiling behind various trees. We get regular orders from him and we still don’t know his real name but it always makes us laugh as he seems like such a happy guy but in the most ambiguous of places!

It varies from week to week. Our most busy time is obviously Christmas and in the final weeks before the 25th December we have done 100 large prints on various media in one day.

I notice that you also have a blog on 101, is this written by someone specific at 101 or is it a joint effort?

This is an in-house blog which we’re trying to keep up to date but to be honest it has fallen a little down the pecking order with our new product launches. We have some images on there of the prints we did for Proud Galleries world cup exhibition recently though!

We’d certainly love it if users of freephotoresources would check out our website and have a go with our upload system and make use of our free tools!