A Frozen Countrylane
Stitched
printed in black & white, in large sizes only
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A Palm Designed by Bach
Stitched
printed in black & white, in large sizes only
click for purchase / more info
When the digital revolution arrived we were provided with means to achieve large-format quality by stitching. When medium format mirrorless digital cameras became available, an even more direct possibility for large-format photography by other means than large-format cameras had arrived. What I can now do with my Hasselblad x2d rivals the definition, the details and sharpness of my 8×10 negatives. Photography by analogue means retains a special quality, which is different from what the best digital cameras can produce, but not necessarily inferior.
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’.
Changing 8×10 inch sheetfilm when traveling was a bit of an ordeal. After a hot today in Death Valley, Canyonlands, or one of the other unsurpassed landscape-rich parts of the American West, I would for more than an hour be stuck in a darkened motel bathroom. It takes roughly half an hour to check whether, with towels blocking light from under the door, they are truly pitchdark. The reward of perhaps one or two great 8×10 negatives, where worth the energy and time.
But there came a point when this had become too much for me. Fortunately, the digital revolution in photography happened just about at that time, and soon I discovered that as the software for working with images produced by image sensors improved at relatively great speed, it became possible to achieve even much bigger prints than from a 8×10 negative through stitching together a lot of images covering parts of the subject.
I began doing this with landscapes, temples, and anything else which did not contain much movement, for angles of view no one had seen before.