About Photo Enhancements
Hi! I'm Neal Martin, the guiding light behind Photo Enhancements. I started Photo Enhancements back in 1999 when my brother asked me if I could do some photo altering for his business clients in Auckland. Having graduated in 1991 with a Bachelor of Engineering (Electrical and Electronic) I was up to date with computers but totally ignorant of fixing photos!
However, with a little research, I bought a copy of Photoshop, a high end scanner, graphics tablet and a book on how to use Photoshop. A few months later I learned the basics and my brother threw me in the deep end.
I had to restore, colourise, remove people from backgrounds and enhance images. As I was only paid on results I learned pretty quickly how to do everything right! Soon, my brother was so happy with the results he said I was good enough to go public - which I did!
At this time digital printing was fairly rare or very expensive to do when wanting quality results. All my prints were done at a local photo outlet, with larger prints sent to Auckland to be done. This was expensive and time consuming - I needed my own printer! By 2002, disappointed with the local service, I bought my first printer an Epson 2100 pigment ink printer. It could do up to A3+ size and made quality photo prints - control at last.
As time went by customers were asking for bigger sized photo prints - especially 16 x 20 and A2 prints. The small Epson was expensive to run and couldn't keep
up with the volumes of prints. So I took the jump in 2005 and bought a new Epson 4000 . This was a solid high volume printer capable of printing A2 images with
ease. With scales of economy the printer was well worth the purchase.
Later in the year I bought my first digital camera - a Canon 20D DSLR with a 70-200mm L lense. I wanted to capture photos of field hockey games at the
Northland Hockey Association stadium. Currently I have 20,000+ photos of games played sinced then with tens of thousands of photo viewings each month. The Epson
printer was great for printing my own photos.
As with all things, times changed and I heard about canvas printing. Customers were now asking if I offered this service. Seeing the growing demand I quickly got up to speed and learned the process. Again I found I was handicapped by the limitation of size prints the Epson could make with edge mounted canvas prints. So in early 2007 I purchased the Hewlett Packard Z3100 a marvellous wide format printer capable of printing anything thrown at it.
With all the printing side covered I turned my sights on a dedicated slide and negative scanner. Customers were wanting quality enlargements of old slides and negatives to be printed to canvas and large photo prints. In late 2008 I bought the Nikon 9000 a marvellous tool suited for the job.
Present day I still offer the same restoration and altering services. Combined with the custom print options available I still offer a personal service for all my customers.