I want to make you feel like you are standing there with me, soaking in the scene.
There are 2 challenges to making this happen.
The first is to take a picture that has the clarity to produce a large print. When practicing began in 2001, I was taking landscape photographs morning and night and learning Photoshop during the day. As the Photoshop skills improved, a thought struck that the scene being shot could be captured by zooming in and taking multiple rows of pictures, then stitching them together. This technique would give a higher resolution image, which is what was needed to print a large image.
This shot at Grand Canyon was the first large project. There are 35 individual pictures that are carefully stitched into a composite, the stitching took around 60 hours to complete.
The second challenge is printing – I had no idea that printing would be so exasperatingly hard to master. The first print of the above photo was horrible. It took six months of refining my Photoshop skills and understanding how large format printers work to get an acceptable result. This was, to put it bluntly, six months of hell. Fortunately the struggle through the learning curve was well worth the effort and the end product got progressively better. I sold my first large print in 2003.
