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Science & Technology 3/24/03
Artist
For one photographer, a
powerful digital camera and its clarity are the key
to capturing landscapes as art
Few things offend landscape photographer
Stephen Johnson more than a typical national park postcard. The oversaturated colors and hackneyed "classic" views, he complains, do little to capture the essence of wild places. Johnson allows that it's not entirely the photographers' fault. Then what else is to blame? Film. "Color accuracy and color film photography are not synonymous," he notes.
Getting that medium to match reality can mean an
endless battle in the darkroom. It's a battle
Johnson abandoned in January 1994, when he converted
his large-format camera to digital with a special
attachment and took his first pictures. Johnson was
already a professional photographer and a consultant
to digital scanners and publishers in the San
Francisco area. Offered a chance to try out the
140-megapixel digital "scanning back," he
and its designer, Michael Collette, spent a day
taking photographs with both film and the digital
attachment. What he saw on his computer that night
changed his career.
"The amount of actual
resolution, the ability to hold highlights and
shadows, the extraordinary accuracy of the
color--the results were just astounding," he
recalls. Johnson abandoned film that day and began
immersing himself in the idiosyncrasies of digital
scanning-back photography. In the process he became
a rarity--an exclusively digital fine-art
photographer. With his heavy camera and sweeping
landscapes, "his work loops back to
turn-of-the-century photography," says David
Adamson, a leading digital printmaker, "but he
transcends that tradition by . . . making the leap
into the digital world."
Color lines.
Digital scanning backs, which can cost tens of
thousands of dollars, are distant kin to ordinary
digital cameras. While consumer models record an
image all at once and register red, green, and blue
light in alternate pixels, scanning-back devices
scan across the image line by line, capturing the
colors separately and then merging all three into
each pixel. The result: extremely fine resolution
and true-to-life color saturation. Collette's
prototype required nearly four minutes to make a
single image. The current version of the digital
camera back, the BetterLight, takes just over a
minute.
While this rules out using the device
for action shots, the line-by-line scanning can
produce captivating effects, particularly when
there's water in the scene. The slicing of time
lifts waves into brushstroke-like pinnacles flecked
by minuscule rainbows. Wind-whipped mist whisked off
a waterfall paints ghostly fingers across the
surrounding rocks. And because of the enormous size
of the image files, even taking a magnifying glass
to one of Johnson's 40-by-60-inch prints
won't reveal an iota of graininess.
Nine
years after he first saw what digital scanning backs
could do, Johnson is putting the finishing touches
on "With a New Eye," a digital survey of
more than 50 of America's national parks (you
can see glimpses at www.sjphoto.com). He hopes that
his work, combined with increasingly powerful
consumer digital cameras, will convince others that
digital is the future of art photography as well as
of snapshots. "Digital photography has the
promise of being dramatically better than film-based
photography," he says. "On the high end
where I'm working, it already is."
-Janet Rae-Dupree
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