The Parks Project

Stephen Johnson's historic photography of the national parks With a New Eye represents a superb realization of digital landscape photography at its highest resolution, executed with extraordinary beauty. This pioneering ten year all digital photographic project is nearing completion with production underway on a touring fine-art exhibition, a photographic portfolio, a series of posters, a DVD and a large-format photographic book. Johnson has traveled 75,000 miles, made over 2500 132mb photographs from over 52 parks and has been featured in 40 journals in the US, Europe and Mexico since 1994.


The Book
A primary outcome of the 10 years of groundbreaking fieldwork on the Digital National Parks Project will be an exhibition-format book.

This fine-arts book includes an extensive collection of photographs from the project, the creator's field notes, documentary photographs accompanied by image notes and technical explanations of the digital photographic technology.
This state of the art digital photographic work will be printed with state of the art filmless direct-to-plate technology for the highest quality reproductions possible.

O'Reilly Media Press Release


Background

With a New Eye is the groundbreaking digital photographic project by photographer Stephen Johnson exploring selected American National Parks from 1994 through 2004. This project will culminate in a photographic portfolio, a touring art exhibition,a poster, a CD ROM (cataloging the work, demonstrating the technology and discussing the National Park ethic and system), and an interpretive photographic book.

The project employs the Dicomed 4x5 and Better Light digital inserts, a Sinar-X 4x5 view camera, and the Apple Macintosh PowerBook 540c, 3400c, G3, and G4 series for completely portable digital photography of very high quality. These cameras are capable of color, black and white, and infrared photographs of 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.)

The photographs are previewed in the field, on screen, in order to determine appropriate contrast, exposure and color balance, and to check composition and focus. The final photograph is also examined after exposure.

For documentary and archival purposes, a Global Positioning System Receiver (GPS) is being used to determine the longitude and latitude of every photograph. A simple compass is used to determine direction of view.

Previews of the exhibit have been shown in Kilkenny Ireland, Carmel California, Palo Alto California, New York City, San Francisco, Mexico City and Bedford Massachusetts. Original prints are available for purchase.

Project Information

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Last updated on June 21, 2004. Mail comments to: sjphoto@aol.com
Photographs and Text Copyright ©2004 Stephen Johnson. All Rights Reserved.