Image Format: Traditional

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The Black Canyon of the Gunnison is one of the most impressive parks in Colorado, with its extremely narrow and deep granite chasms. During an autumn trip I discovered this juniper near Dragon Point on the south rim of the canyon. There are a number of interesting junipers in that area, but this is certainly my favorite. The afternoon light cast long shadows from the tree and from the surrounding vegetation, creating a nice contrast with the brighter areas of the trunk. Upon returning home I contacted the park to share this image, and indeed many of the personnel were familiar with the tree and also expressed their admiration for its unique form. A park biologist had been working to identify the species, but I don't know if an official determination was made. At that time he believed it to be a Utah Juniper (Juniperus osteosperma), simply due to the extensive twisting of the trunk, a noted characteristic of the species. It is also likely that prevailing wind shear near the canyon edge contributes to the effect. A print of this image was recognized with a first place award in a recent 5-State competition in Hays.

This image was captured with a modern 4x5" view camera, onto a sheet of B&W negative film. The camera design allows completely independent adjustment of the lens and film planes, affording advantages of sharper focus placement and perspective control that are impossible with conventional fixed cameras. Composition and focusing are performed under a dark cloth while viewing the image projection on a ground glass screen. The various optics I have chosen for this large format system are some of the finest in the world, and the size of the camera allows the capture of incredible amounts of information. The tree and surrounding near foreground formed a relatively vertical and planar subject, so in this case the view camera's tilt or swing movements were not required. The juniper is growing from a rock outcropping roughly two feet high, however, and consequently the center of the desired image was still a few feet above the level of the camera. To effectively point the camera upward, while still maintaining the correct perspective, the view camera allows the lowering of the camera's rear standard to vertically compose the image. This is exactly the same technique used to maintain proper perspective in architectural photography.

With no automatic exposure aids built into the camera, luminance measurements of the scene are made with a handheld digital spotmeter, then manually transferred to the aperture and shutter controls of the lens. For negative film photography, the exposure should be mainly gauged according to the dark areas of the scene, as they cannot significantly be altered during the subsequent film processing. I therefore placed the foreground shadows slightly below a zone III exposure to ensure detail would be retained in those areas. This exposure, however, caused the brightest regions of the encroaching clouds to fall on nearly zone VIII, which would have been rendered with little texture. To adjust this, a shorter development time was given to the film thereby reducing the highlight density by approximately one zone, and effectively contracting the density range to better fit the subsequent scanning process.

As with all of my film, the negative was scanned and digitized using a very high resolution virtual drum scanner, resulting in a highly detailed digital file. With film of this size, the resulting digital image has a pixel resolution of about 80 megapixels, allowing larger print sizes while still retaining a very sharp appearance. The archival printing is accomplished with professional wide-format equipment, onto the finest museum quality papers.