Zabriskie Point
The best known viewpoint in Death Valley whose pointed outcrop of rock, with geological layers visible, emerges sensationally from its surroundings at sunrise. Different from what its name would suggest, this national park offers an unending variety of most spectacular and spectacularly colored scenes.
8×10 inch photography
printed in color, in large sizes only
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Canyonlands
The American Southwest is home to the largest variety of spectacular scenic beauty that I know of. The effects of millennia of whatever it is that carves rocks has produced canyons that invariably take one’s breath away. Canyonlands is, I think, the most impressive of all. When was there first with my 8 x 10 Deardorff, in the 1970s things were less regulated than they are now, and the area was almost entirely freely accessible.
8×10 inch photography
printed in black and white, in large sizes only
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Britstlecone Pine
These trees are the oldest still living things in the world. Some go back roughly 5000 years. There is a concentration of them in the Inyo National Forest in California. They provide the photographer with some of the wildest contrasty tree forms imaginable.
8×10 inch photography
printed in black and white, in large sizes only
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Black Canyon of the Gunnison
Another spectacular Canyon, dark and lined with the most graphically rugged walls, created by the erosive force over the Gunnison River, is a scene one can come upon entirely unexpectedly. Approaching it through relatively flat pastoral landscape one would never imagine that something like this could be around the corner.
8×10 inch photography
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Bird Steps on White Sands
The advantage of a view camera – technical camera with independent front standard with lens board and rear standard holding the ground glass and film holders – is that one can alter the focal plane relative to the film plane in order to achieve depth of field that one could never achieve with the long focal length lenses required by this format. In the print made with this negative made in New Mexico one can count the grains of salt.
8×10 inch photography
printed in black and white, in large sizes only
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As digital sensor technology advanced I began to explore how it could help me achieve 8×10 quality outside the traditional darkroom by stitching many exposures together. That was a revelation, because the possibility of combining multiple exposures could overcome major photographic barriers which painters
had never needed to worry about. The stitched images could have a field of vision that no lens could obtain without a lot of distortion. I could also increase resolution greatly, and therefor gain more detail that ever before, which made it possible to make huge prints; as big as a whole wall if necessary.
Spider Rock
A tall rock formation in Arizona’s Canyon de Chelly National Monument as viewed from a famous viewing place. The scene it looks down on is territory of the Navajo Nation, a separate world of agricultural activity.
8×10 inch photography
printed in black and white, in large sizes only
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Silo
Architectural beauty one may run into all over the West and Midwest of the United States. A feast of straight lines and wonderful interplay of different shades of light and shadow. If I remember correctly, this photograph was taken in Montana.
8×10 inch photography
printed in black and white, in large sizes only
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In Jack London’s Garden
A park attached to the home of the author Jack London in California. I’m not sure but I think that this is an image that would be very difficult to produce by digital photographic means.
8×10 inch photography
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Early Morning in Nagano
Taken roughly between six and seven on a winter morning in the Japan Alps of northern Japan, before the sun had been able to remove the mist that had rolled over the mountain ranges in the distant.
8×10 inch photography
printed in black and white, in large sizes only
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The digital revolution has change photography in many ways, but the most important one I think is that we can now do things, through multiple exposures, that for centuries had been the privilege of only painters.
Many of my stitched images were made with more than 150 exposures. Many of them shown here, can go to two and a half meters wide. This lust for detail has been with me from the very beginning of my life in photography.
As sharpness was usually my goal in this quest for super realism in my images, things close by and far away should be equally sharp. Painters never had a problem with this, but photographers had to choose: either extreme foreground sharp and backgroud blurry, or vice versa.
How to call the photography that has now become possible by overcoming the limitations that never stopped painters? A term that came to my mind was the ‘painterly perspective’.
Morning Mist
Early morning in Fukushima prefecture of Japan.
8×10 inch photography
printed in black and white, in large sizes only
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The Race Track in Death Valley
The rock at the bottom was close to my feet, and the rock formation in the center was kilometers away, and the mountains behind it another long distance. Yet another example of the depth of field achieved by the so-called Scheimpflug principle with tilting the lens board. The scene is called the racetrack because rocks move over the desiccated surface by forces not entirely understood.
8×10 inch photography
printed in color, in large sizes only
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The Devil’s Golfcourse
Yet another one of the majestic scenes of Death Valley. It shows salt formations at the bottom of what used to be a gigantic lake. The edge of it, kilometers away, before the mountains in the far distance is sharply delineated as if drawn by a ruler due to the absence of any humidity in the atmosphere.
8×10 inch photography
printed in black and white, in large sizes only
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___________________
// PERSONAL NOTE
I am thrilled by photographic detail, and after using medium format cameras (a 6×6 twinlens Ikoflex in my teens, and a Hasselblad when I could afford one in my 20s) I realized that these could not deliver negatives that would satisfy me fully. I left my home in the Netherlands when I was 19 and hitchhiked to Turkey, and from there to India, on a simple quest to see the world. Two years later that quest led to an arrival in Japan, one of the great centers of photography, both with respect to making the highest quality cameras for ordinary people affordable as well as the many Japanese photographers filling a plethora of thick photo magazines with their work. In Japan I discovered the 4 x 5 inch format. But as I was working in total darkness for developing the sheet film, and in dim light enlarging the negatives, it occurred to me that I could spend all that energy for results that were four times larger. The 8 x 10 Deardorff that I picked up on the trip to the US changed my life. This incredible mahogany field camera with its leather bellows is beautiful through its utterly simple perfect design. Covered by a black cloth, you compose the upside down image by moving the parts without your eyes on them, as if playing the violin. Objects right in front of you and at infinity were rendered sharp by tilting the lens plane.
With no other camera does one get the same sensation of being in control of the scene before you. I miss it, but then I don’t miss it at the same time because of the kilos of tripod, heavy lenses, and bags with a dozen or so sheet film holders one has to drag everywhere.