Hi all,

I just had a look at Stephen Johnson's site about his project to digitally photograph the US national parks - 'With a New Eye'. What makes this unique is that he is using 4x5 digital backs to do this! He is using a Sinar-X 4x5 view camera, with Dicomed 4x5 and Better Light digital inserts, and the Apple Macintosh PowerBook 540c, 3400c, and G3 series computers, items usually associated with taking still-life studio images.

This setup allows the taking of images in color, black and white, and infrared with extremely high resolution and dynamic range (Dicomed: 6000x7520 pixels, 130MB files with more than 9 stops of exposure latitude and the Better Light: 6000x8000 pixels, 142MB files with more than 10 stops of exposure latitude.)

Obviously the examples on the web site do not show the quality of his images very well, although they look impressive, and I'm wondering if anyone has seen the originals and cares to comment on them. I'm also wondering what you all think of this concept and whether this is what the future holds for LF photography, albeit in a more compact and easier to handle setup.

I realise that carrying all this gear into the wilderness to take images seems like a lot of effort, but maybe this is how the photographers of the past felt like when lugging their heavy 8x10 (and larger) cameras, tripods and plates around (I'm sure I once saw an image of one famous photog & his mule carrying a lot of gear).

On another 'pro' photography list I subscribe to, many of the commercial photographers have commented of late about the demise of a number of E6 processing labs and how the push for digital is quickly overtaking the demand for film. Some of the recent threads here too have noted the discontinuation of some LF size films. I think Stephen Johnson's project is a glimpse into the future of LF photography (or is it already here) and I would be interested to hear others' comments.

You can visit his 'parks project' web site at:

http://www.sjphoto.com/parks_project_photos.html

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

Kind regards

Peter Brown

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Festina lente - hurry slowly

- Latin proverb