Professional Photography Exhibition Printing -- Inside Bay Photo's 50th Anniversary Gala
- TeamBay
- May 15
- 4 min read
Hangar 41 is a former World War II aircraft hangar on the Alameda, California waterfront - steel girders, concrete floors, a ceiling that climbs high enough to make the space feel open rather than enclosed. Bay Photo's 50th Anniversary Gala filled it on April 24th with world-class ocean photography, photographers, and fifty years of craft on full display.
The main exhibition was the US premiere of Ocean Photographer of the Year - drawn from over 15,000 global submissions and presented by Oceanographic Magazine and Blancpain, printed entirely on Bay Photo MetalPrints. The surface reads differently depending on where you stand. From across the room, the images are direct, almost reportorial. Up close, the depth in the print shifts what you're seeing - color holds, blacks stay black, detail that would compress on other substrates stays open.
Bay Photo chose to mark its fifty years this way. A room. Photography on walls. The community in person.
A WWII Hangar, an Ocean Exhibition, and Fifty Years of Craft
Ocean Photographer of the Year is UK-based, associated with Oceanographic Magazine, and its exhibitions have historically stayed close to home. Getting the US premiere to Alameda, CA took about ten months of work.
Tara Pilbrow, Executive Director of West End Arts District - the small arts nonprofit that organized the event - started reaching out to the UK competition team around November of last year, while simultaneously trying to secure the hangar from the city of Alameda. Building department. Fire department. Plumbing from 1941. The unglamorous logistics that make a project like this possible.
"I kind of believed in it," she said. "With these projects, you only do the ones where you're really like - okay, this will make me lose sleep, but it's worth it."
Bay Photo came on as the official print partner. West End Arts District had been staring at these images on screens for months - sorting, debating, making calls.
Then the MetalPrints arrived.
Some images they had loved online turned out quieter in person. Others they had barely noticed became the ones people stood in front of the longest. Print does that - redistributes the visual weight in a photograph in ways a file preview doesn't show you.
What It Looked Like Inside
Bay Photo's prints structured the space. Without them, it's an airplane hangar. With them, it became distinct sections, different paces of moving through the work.
Nick Winkworth, Board President for West End Arts District and a photographer himself, spent weeks in that building before the gala. Cleaning it out. Hanging work. Fixing plumbing.
"We've done this essentially with no money," he said, "but with amazing friends, supporters, sponsors, partners. That's how you make this stuff happen."
The Image That Changed Up Close
One photograph came up in conversation repeatedly: a portfolio series of nudibranchs - small, intensely colored sea creatures photographed against deep black backgrounds. In thumbnail, they read as strong macro work. Printed large on Metal and mounted in that hangar, the blacks stayed dense, the color stayed saturated, and the images moved into a different register entirely. MetalPrints earn their place with that kind of image. The substrate isn't incidental.
On Metal, at scale, in that space - it was quiet and large at the same time.
Bay Perspectives: Local Work, Multiple Surfaces
Alongside the international OPY main exhibition, Bay Photo curated a fourth room - Bay Perspectives - featuring local ocean photographers.
Where the main exhibition ran exclusively on MetalPrints, Bay Perspectives brought in the full range: Metal, Acrylic, Epic, Framed Prints, and Fine Art Prints. Different photographers, different images, different surface decisions. Acrylic handles color and depth differently than Metal. Fine Art paper carries its own authority. Framed Prints read differently on a wall in an airplane hangar. Seeing all of it together in one room made the substrate conversation concrete in a way that's hard to replicate outside an exhibition context.
Alameda sits fifteen minutes from San Francisco by ferry, close enough to the Pacific that ocean conservation is part of daily life on the island. Local photographers on those walls gave the exhibition a connection to place that the international work alone couldn't provide.
Professional Photography Exhibition Printing, Done Right
When Tara Pilbrow asked Christie Boxill, Bay Photo's Brand Partnership Manager, what the main exhibition images needed, the answer was Metal. Pilbrow trusted the call. The prints arrived. She was blown away.
West End Arts District had worked with Bay Photo before, on an earlier event at the Naval Air Station runways. The relationship had built incrementally. By the time the OPY Gala came together, that trust was carrying weight.
Bay Photo was founded in Santa Cruz in 1976. Fifty years across every shift in professional photography - darkroom to digital, prints as default to prints as deliberate choice. The orientation throughout has stayed consistent: output for photographers who care about the difference between a file and a finished print. That shows up in substrate selection, color calibration, how shadow detail renders, and how a large-format image holds together on a wall.
We chose to mark Bay Photo's 50th Anniversary by putting that craft in the service of something larger - a community exhibition, an international competition, a building getting a second life. The anniversary was in the room. The work was the proof of it.
Nick Winkworth put it clearly: "You don't take a photograph with a camera. You take a photograph with your eye and your brain." The same is true of output. The surface is where the photograph becomes something other people can stand in front of.
For fifty years, Bay Photo has been where that happens.
Keep Exploring
Bay Perspectives showed what substrate range looks like across a single exhibition - Metal, Acrylic, Epic, Fine Art, Framed Prints, all in conversation. Professional photography exhibition printing demands those decisions get made deliberately -- surface, scale, and color rendering all affect how a room reads, and Bay Perspectives showed what that range looks like when it's handled well. Those same decisions apply to client delivery, studio display, and personal work.
Bay Photo's full print catalog is worth spending time with.
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Want to stay in the loop on our 50th anniversary festivities?
Explore more here: Bay Photo Turns 50! Bay Photo Lab has been serving professional photographers, fine artists, and creative studios since 1976. The OPY Gala was held April 24, 2026, at Hangar 41, Alameda Point, Alameda, CA. The Ocean Photographer of the Year exhibition ran April 24 – May 17, 2026.
