How hard can an exhibition be? Take some photos, frame them, bung them on the wall.

If only ...

This page is not intended to serve as a definitive guide to mounting an exhibition, just to give a taste of some of what's involved, based on a couple of small one-man exhibitions.

The first task with any initiative is to decide your objectives, and an exhibition is no different. Both my exhibitions were connected with charities, and had twin objectives. First, to showcase what I hope are some decent photos, and second to inspire people to support the work of the charities.

My first exhibition was for Unicef, showing the work they do in schools and pre-schools in Cambodia. You can see the blog from this trip here. The second was for the Chernobyl Children's Project, and the blog is here.

Having twin objectives will often involve some degree of compromise. Some of the photos I chose for both exhibitions were one which weren't among my favourites, but which helped to tell the story. For example, the Chernobyl exhibition had a large photo of the reactor building; as a photo, it was nothing special at all, but it was needed to set the context.

The second task is to find an exhibition space and persuade the gallery or venue that your exhibition will be worthwhile. In my case, this was relatively straightforward as I'm fortunate enough to belong to a camera club with its own gallery. The gallery prides itself on high standards, so all proposed exhibitions have to be approved by the club chairman. This would normally simply be a case of sitting down with the proposed photos.

In the case of my first exhibition, things weren't quite so simple: lead-times for the gallery meant that I had to commit to the exhibition before my trip to Cambodia, and thus before I'd taken a single photo for it! I used some of my previous travel photos to demonstrate the quality of my work, but there was a certain degree of nervousness on my part in booking & publicising an exhibition before I'd even pressed the shutter-release ...

The photography is the easiest part! Choosing the exhibition photos is another matter. You need to think about how many you can sensibly display in the space, at what sizes and with what layouts.

I'd already measured out the gallery wallspace in advance of my first trip, so knew all my options with regards to different combination of landscape (horizontal) and portrait (vertical) orientations. For the large prints, my options were 12 portrait ... 8 landscape ... 4 portrait and 6 landscape ... 9 portrait and 2 landscape ... 2 portrait and 7 landscape ... 8 portrait and 3 landscape ... or 3 portrait and 6 landscape!

Adding the smaller prints generated an even more bewildering number of permutations, so I decided to adopt the KISS principle: eight 30x20" landscape prints (mounted in 40x30" frames) and sixteen 12x8" prints (mounted in 20x16" frames), mixed landscape and portrait, two beneath each large print.

That gave me 24 photos to choose, and I very nearly made it. I reduced it to 25, and decided to display the 25th shot on the glass door, which also had the benefit of enticing people in to see more. For the Chernobyl exhibition, explanatory text was needed, so I replaced eight of the small photos with commentary.

Post-processing the final cut is the next job on the list. For those not familiar with digital photography, post-processing is the computer equivalent of what we used to do in the darkroom. I don't do much post-processing, so thankfully that didn't take too long.

Next came the layout plan. This was needed as an aide-memoire when hanging the prints, and also as a reference for people ordering prints. This is the plan for the Chernobyl exhibition, and each set of four large and four small prints represents one wall of the gallery:

The printing was straightforward. I've been very happy with the quality of prints from www.photobox.co.uk, so I ordered the prints online.

The next step was mounting and framing. My DIY skills are legendary - for their complete and utter absence. But if you add together the cost of buying frames with professional mounting ... well, you'd best be sitting down when you see the total.

Fortunately, I was able to save money in three ways. I already owned eight pre-matted 40x30" frames, used to display some of my photos at home:

I used those for the large prints. The club owns a set of 20x16" frames, so I arranged to borrow those, which then left only the mounting.

A fellow club member, Ian Greaves, came to my rescue, mounting them for me at a very reasonable cost. I happily left all the measurements and fiddly stuff to him!

It's often the trivia that takes the time. For example, my large frames are quite deep, and at home they were hung simply by resting the inside of the frame on two screws. The exhibition system requires picture-cord or wire, so I had to source and buy some suitable attachment clips. The first supplier turned out to have misunderstood what I was after, and didn't have anything suitable, so buying these took two lunchbreaks.

Another example: the prints needed to be numbered, and for neatness I wanted stickers with white numbers on a black background. Visits to several stationary stores found me lots of other colour variations, but not this one. It took another entire lunchbreak to source these:

With the photos & mounting on the way, it was back to the to-do list. An exhibition would be rather theoretical without an audience, so time to sort out some invitations.

In the old days, printing & distributing invitations would have been expensive. These days, the combination of email and cheap photo printing made it cheap & easy. The printed invitation was simply a 6x4" photo created in Photoshop, and I created an email version of it also.

Pricing is always tricky. I had to decide this very early on for the Cambodia exhibition, as the PR agency wanted to know the range to include in the press release. All profits were going to Unicef, so I wanted to make it possible for most people to make a purchase, while also creating the possibility of raising a worthwhile amount. By virtue of the tried-and-trusted 'finger in the air' approach, I told the PR agency '£40 to £400' and filled in the blanks afterwards.

I created a simple order form in Powerpoint:

Things were simpler for the Chernobyl exhibition: I wasn't expecting anyone to want to hang these on their wall!

I am not known for very practical tastes in cars. For the first exhibition, I had a classic 911; for the second, an SLK. Neither, I can report, can transport eight 40x30" frames. Minicabs proved the answer.

For the Cambodia exhibition, I had rather naively imagined that a couple of hours would be adequate for hanging the prints. Ian disillusioned me: getting every print 100% level was, he advised, an all-day job. As the gallery exhibitions are back-to-back, this could only be done the day before the opening. I left the house at 9.20am, which I have to tell you is bloody early for me on a Sunday morning.

Ian proved a real star, volunteering to come to the gallery on the Sunday to help me hang the prints. This was him being diplomatic: the reality was that I helped him hang the prints.

He had arrived very early and already put the smaller mounted prints into the club frames, and lined these up along the wall.

Ian was right: it is not easy! The hanging system is a series of moveable hangers suspended on vertical wires.

As each hanger is independently adjustable, and has to be loosened & tightened with a screwdriver, getting even a single print perfectly square takes time and care. Getting a whole row all perfectly level is something else. No prizes for guessing which of us took care of this, while I acted as labourer and photographer.

Ian hung all the small prints while I got one with mounting the large ones. This task was just about within my capabilities as the large frames were pre-matted.

The trickiest part was getting rid of all the dust! Prints, matts and glass all seem to attract the stuff. I found that working over a black surface was the best way to spot it all.

But eventually we finished the first wall and started on the second.

We started just after 10.30am, and finished shortly before 4pm.

Fortunately, the experience meant that things were quicker the second time, and I framed the large prints at home, so things took about four hours for the Chernobyl exhibition - plus another bit of tweaking on the day.

The private view in both cases was the following evening. Monday afternoon was spent shopping, laying out the food and chilling the white wine.

I'd meant to take some photos during the Cabodia private view, but non-stop conversations put paid to that plan. That was a lesson learned for the Chernobyl exhibition, so a friend, Kathryn, kindly did the honours:

Both exhibitions seemed to be well-received.

My advice for anyone considering an exhibition? It is a lot more work than you might imagine! I didn't keep track of the total number of hours, but if you read through the above, estimate how much time you think that took and then triple it, you will probably not be too far off the mark. It is the fiddly little things that you don't tend to think of at the outset that really add up.

But the work is worthwhile. It's a very satisfying feeling to see your work hanging in a gallery, and it's a pleasant ego-boost to hear all of the kind comments people make. I did leave it a year between the first and the second, and suspect I'll do the same again before the third: that's how long it takes me to forget all the effort involved ...