I really like this company:

https://www.zno.com

They have deals all the time, so never pay full price (as with most printing services). The printing is done in China, just in case that bothers you, but shipping is usually 1-2 days so in that respect the distance doesn’t matter (assuming you’re in North America).

The books I like from them are the Flush Mount albums which allow for a seamless panorama to be printed across 2 pages, and all photos are mounted to foam core which makes a really premium feeling book. The downside of the foamcore is that number of pages are limited if you were hoping for a lot. They have other options as well and offer free sample books if you want to do a test.

The reasons why I don’t like the really cheap books other than lower quality “magazine style” press printing is that most of the ones I’ve ordered have warped. There is often a humidity difference between where you live and where the printing is done and that can cause issues. I usually order fairly large coffee table style books though, so warping is a bigger problem with those than it is for smaller books. Quality wise, as long as the photos are going on good quality paper and being done by an actual printer (not a press), you should be fine.

Anyway, just another option to look at.

You can do this with a formula based on the megapixels. I don’t know what camera you have but let’s say it’s 24MP and I am assuming you are using a full frame camera, otherwise that 400mm lens will have a different FOV depending on exactly the camera body you are using - for example 600mm or 640mm if it’s an APS-C body. Also note all lens focal lengths are rated at infinity focus, and magnification changes near minimum focus distance are common and can result in a different effective focal length depending on lens design.

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This how the math works:

(Desired focal length / actual focal length) squared

Then take your megapixel count and divide it by that value.

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EXAMPLE Now let’s say you want to see what 600mm would be like, using your 400mm lens and your 24MP full frame camera (feel free to correct my assumptions). Find something far in the distance to take a picture of to eliminate any magnification change caused by the specific lens design.

600/400 = 1.5. Square that (resolution is a square function) and you get 2.25. Now divide your megapixels by 2.25 (24 / 2.25) and you get 10.67MP.

Go into your editor of choice and make a 3:2 crop (the aspect ratio of a full frame camera sensor) that gives you a ~10MP final image. Crop wherever you want and that is what the image would look like if taken with a 600mm lens instead of a 400mm lens. Hope I explained that clearly.

Two main things to consider here.

1. As you seem to already know, most screens are way too bright for photo editing, which becomes a bigger problem when printing. Some are even so bright they are impossible to calibrate as the minimum level of their backlighting is too high. You want to be editing around 100-120 cd/m2 (nits) in most situations. Given that you are pressed for time and won’t be able to do a proper calibration, you can get light meter phone apps to help you approximate nits to set your monitor brightness manually. If you understand how histograms work, you can also use that as a rough guide.

2. Prints are meant to be lit, so the environment you view them in can have a huge impact on how bright/dark they look. This is why when you go to an actual gallery, they will have lighting strategically aimed at the prints. If you think they are too dark, make sure that is still the case under proper lighting. A lot of prints look too dark because of where they are viewed even if the source file is perfectly exposed. The print medium (paper type, canvas, metal, etc.) also matters, some reflect more light than others.

As others have mentioned, test prints are the surefire way to check the results. There isn’t going to be a huge difference between print shops if you’re just worried about brightness, so you could for example edit one photo with 5 different levels of brightness, take it to a 1hr photo printer, and then note the settings used on the one that looks best to your eye. Reputable print shops will actually provide you with an ICC profile to match their printers which might help you as well. If you send them your photos they might also be able to tell you if they are too dark, and some print shops offer auto-correction/image enhancement if you opt for it. Depends on the shop.

If you’re so inclined, it probably wouldn’t be very hard to just do it properly and buy a colorimeter (X-Rite, Sypder, etc.) from Amazon with 1-day/same day shipping and the calibration process itself is not very time consuming. That’s what I would do assuming you have more than a day or so of time and if its something you plan on doing in the future anyway.

Once you have a properly calibrated setup, to the extent to which that is possible on a display that does not support hardware calibration with a proper LUT, then you’re all set. Everything will look about as it should on a monitor or in print. Calibration also has to be re-done on a regular basis, especially if only being done via software (which is your situation). What you can’t control is other people viewing your images on uncalibrated displays, but that will be a variable no matter what you do on your end.

Get into Macro photography - subjects are endless and everything looks so much different at high magnification. All of a sudden it becomes interesting to take a photo of a dollar bill, coins, food, insects, pretty much anything you can think of. Nobody makes a bad macro lens either, so you can find them quite cheap especially on the used market.

Buy a cheap telephoto lens and get into wildlife/bird photography. I don’t know where you live but there’s got to be some wildlife around. Get an annual pass to your local zoo if that’s an option, most of them are very cheap relative to a single visit ticket price.

Get a flash (or several) and set up a home studio for portrait photography or product photography. Again this can be done extremely cheaply with very professional looking results.

Most of the online photo hosting platforms meet your description and are highly customizable by the user, either for personal or professional use. Can you remember anything more specific? The most popular ones are Smugmug and Flickr.

You’re describing compression. It’s basically perspective distortion caused by the distance between your camera and the subject. It’s most apparent when using long focal lengths and close subject distances, however it is a common misconception that the compression is actually caused by the focal length - it isn’t.

For example, if you take the same photo of your subject with a 24mm lens and a 200mm lens, both from 10 feet away, the 200mm photo is going to give you the “compressed” look, however if you cropped the 24mm photo to match the framing of the 200mm photo, you would see that the two frames are identical (minus the obvious quality loss from the crop), so the focal length is not responsible for the compression. The 200mm lens is basically giving you a ‘lossless’ crop of the same image as the one taken with the 24mm lens in this example. This extremely narrow field of view is what gives the photo the compressed look that you’re after, making background elements appear enlarged or closer to your subject.