Pictures:

About the images.

My images are all printed digitally with a LightJet 5000 laser printer on Fuji Crystal Archive paper. The images are called archival, and accelerated tests predict very long lifetimes.  Film is scanned at a very high resolution and the LightJet 5000 projects the scan onto photographic paper which is then processed chemically,  The resulting prints are true photographic prints indistinguishable from those obtained by use of an enlarger.

The prints made from the images shown here are quite impressive because I make them large (often 32x40), and as everyone knows who has looked at prints, size does matter.  The on-screen digital images are poor things in comparison.

By and large, I do little in the way of digital manipulation.  I prefer to hew as closely to the subject as possible, but sometimes a composition presents insurmountable difficulties when ordinary photographic methods are used.  For example, I came upon this magnificent pair of sycamores standing alone at the edge of a New Jersey backroad. From the angle of my first approach, there seemed to be only one tree, and I visualized a composition of isolation and loneliness.  There was junk in the way; power lines and an extraneous road. The finished, digitally edited composition, is shown above.  Click on it to view an 8x10 image -- too bad I can’t show you a print.

I was fortunate, in the moon.  I had of course noted it as I drove, but little hoped that I could use it in a scene. In fact, when I first saw the sycamores, the moon was hidden in the branches and was not visible, but lucky me, after I had set up, there it was, rising up and away from the leafless limbs which clawed after it as it fled their grasp.

For comparison, the manipulated image is shown on the left here while the original scanned image, with all the extraneous details intact,  is shown on the right  It may be seen that I have removed the telephone lines, the road, and even moved and enlarged the moon in order to bring the composition closer to my visualization. This is an extreme case.  I seldom do this much to an image, but there was no other angle from which I could take the photograph.