When I decided to become a professional photographer in 2001 the digital evolution (revolution) was in its infancy. Some medium format photographers were scanning their transparencies and then adjusting them in Photoshop. Others were experimenting with the early digital backs. Hardly anyone was shooting with a digital SLR (Single Lens Reflex) camera. The main reason for this was that the resolution of these early digital cameras was not high enough.

Canon and Olympus had just come out with their first generation digital SLR's. The idea of digital capture, digital darkroom, and digital printing sure sounded good to me. I decided to buy an Olympus E10. I was not ready to make the Nikon-Canon lens decision. This seemed to me to be an excellent alternative, especially since I had to learn how to be a field photographer and I had to learn Photoshop. The E10 had some flaws (poor signal to noise ratio in low light, a fixed lens, and was it slow!), but on the up side there was never a dust problem, and the lens quality was very good. I then bought a tripod, a couple of extra compact disk cards, and I was off to the races.

I wanted to do landscape photography from the very beginning, and I wanted to do large mural prints. I believed there was a market for large murals that brought dramatic landscape scenes into the walls of corporate America and homes with large walls. To do this I had to overcome multiple challenges:

1) How do I achieve resolution with a 4.1 megapixel camera that can be blown up large enough to make the viewer feel like he/she was standing at the actual site of the photograph?

2) Shooting in low light was a problem for the E10.

3) How do I get a balanced exposure at dusk and dawn so that there would be detail in the low light foreground and detail in the bright light of the sunrise/sunset.

And, I had not even begun to consider the challenge of printing large images.

I spent the next couple of years shooting in the morning and evening, and learning photoshop in between. The thought struck me one day that I could take progressive images of a scene and put them back together digitially. This would give me the necessary resolution for making large prints. Because I was taking multiple rows of photos of a scene, I discovered that none of the 3rd party stitching programs were up to the task of putting multiple rows of digital images together into a composite whole. Photoshop to the rescue. I taught myself how to manually assemble the mulitple row of photos into a seamless composite. This was hard work and took lots of hours to do, but it was well worth the effort.

This shot at Grand Canyon was my first large project. The stitching took me around 60 hours to complete.

Before stitching and printing.

The good news is the time to stitch got shorter with each new project as I perfected my technique.

The final challenge was printing. My first large printer was an Epson 10000. I had no idea that printing would be so challenging. My first print of the above photo was horrible. It took six months of refining my photoshop skills and understanding printer profiles and how they are used correctly to get an acceptable result. This was, to put it bluntly, six months of hell. As I struggled through the learning curve the end product got progressivly better. I sold my first large print in 2003.

Thomas Edison said, "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration". I am no genius, but I think Mr. Edison observation accurately reflects the amount of work needed to perfect a skill like photography.

Cameras and software are evolving rapidly. Photoshop now has an automated routine that does a pretty good job of stitching. It is named "photomerge". It has some limitations, but it has sure made the process easier. I am shooting with a 21 megapixel Canon 5D Mk II. The software and cameras just keep getting better.