But the more immediate impetus was a commission I did for the Boston Symphony Orchestra in its Boston Pops mode.

I produced a montage of my landscape images that was projected on a forty-five foot screen above the orchestra during two live performances in Boston Symphony Hall. The music was Antonin Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9, “From the New World”.

As an outgrowth of this experience, the first of the new films is edited to the lyrical Largo, or slow movement, of the Dvorak symphony. It is twelve and a half minutes in length and expands the Boston montage to include new work—107 landscape images in all.

The project is created in 4K resolution to take advantage of the high level of detail captured in my 4″x5″ film transparencies. 4K is the standard for digital projection of feature films in commercial cinemas. The resolution is roughly four times greater than that of full high definition television.

The other five films, also in 4K resolution, are short, animated pieces built from abstract elements. Some of these come from my camera-based work. They run three to five minutes each and have music tracks by twentieth and twenty-first century composers including Bela Bartok, Dmitri Shostakovich, Arvo Pärt, and Charles Mingus. The music is timed to and reinforces the moving visual images.

One of these five pieces features spoken dialogue. It weaves 127 everyday sayings and figures of speech into a fanciful word play—an allegorical narrative that reflects on the tug-of-war between life’s triumphs and reversals and the uncertain nature of our self-perceptions.

The six-film series is intended for immersive, large-scale projection in an installation that also features framed landscape photographs and prints of my camera-based work hanging in a conventional gallery outside the darkened cinema space.

Last fall I took a road trip through the Great Basin country of Eastern Nevada and the Mojave Desert of Southern California.  I’ve added two new images to my active collection from the trip.

The first (above) is an image of rabbitbrush catching the last light of day in a high country meadow.  It was shot in Great Basin National Park, NV.  I was drawn to the way the warm shades of ochre and yellow in the flowering heads contrasted with the cool cyan of the foliage.  To my eye, that combination makes for a harmonious color “chord”.

While in the park, I slept in my truck at 10,000 ft.  

The first night was coal-black.  You know the old thing about not being able to see your hand in front of your face?  This came pretty close!  The sky was by far the darkest I have ever seen.  A bit spooky if you are alone in the campground.  I got up before sunrise and hiked up to a 4,000 year old bristlecone pine grove at 11,000 ft.  The trees were not so isolated and sculptural as the ones in the White Mountains of California so I didn’t get anything to rival earlier bristlecone images.  But the experience of being up there alone on a snowy trail at sunrise was intense and rewarding.  The aftermath was coffee and breakfast on the tailgate surrounded by fall aspens.  

One of the great attractions of Great Basin National Park is that it remains far off the beaten path.  The park saw just 153K visitors last year. Compare that to Great Smoky Mountains NP which was slammed with 11.3 million!  And there is no entrance fee!  Compare that to Yosemite at $35 per vehicle.  Speaking of vehicles, driving south from the park I went 27 minutes without seeing another car.  I timed it!

The second image I have added to my portfolio looks into the infinite sky of a deep crimson twilight in the Mojave Desert.  

It was made with a very long exposure, looking east, in the twilight glow between sundown and moonrise.  I was a mile in and 500 feet up from the trailhead in the Kelso Dunes.  The hike in was bit of a slog—slipping and sliding in the  sand.  Two steps forward and one step back with the heavy camera pack on the steep dune faces.  

The view was spectacular up there and the walk out in the warm, windless night air was stunning.  

On the way home I drove through the former boomtown of Amboy, CA.  It sits in the middle of the Mojave where pre-interstate Highway 66 converged with the Santa Fe Railroad.  It is now almost totally abandoned but its faded glory lives on as a magnet for committed mid-century nostalgia buffs.  

It’s a place where you can still “get your kicks on Route 66”.  The last phone booth persists as pop art, trash works as vernacular sculpture, and a plastic bighorn yearns to break free of his cage.  

The road out of Amboy takes you past the remains of dozens of tiny, abandoned shacks scattered randomly through the landscape.  The one in the photo below is actually among the largest. This ghost community is all that remains of the “jackrabbit homestead” program of the forties and fifties that offered families a small slice of the “useless” Mojave for next to nothing.  

It was a simultaneously disturbing and fascinating encounter with pop archeology.  You can delve into the subject here: http://jackrabbithomestead.com  

I taught a workshop recently on landscape photography in Southwestern Colorado timed to the turning of the aspens in the San Juan Mountains. The three-day session was hosted by the Sorrel Sky Gallery in Durango.

I spent the last night in Mexican Hat where people routinely drive one hundred miles to Cortez, Colorado to get to a supermarket and other services that most of us think of as daily essentials.

The drainages of the high mesas in this region are peppered with Anasazi (more properly, “Puebloan”) ruins—cliff dwellings, kivas, granaries, and meeting places. Hundreds of them. Many are visited by hikers following unmarked trails and stream beds, but the vast majority remain unrecorded and unstudied.

On clear days, the landscape is distinguished by hundred mile vistas. The weather doesn’t sneak up on you. You see it coming. In all directions, red rock cliffs and buttes rise sharply from the valley floors. Vast mesa tops run for miles covered in pinyon-juniper woodlands that have seen some cattle but not many humans since the Anasazi abandoned the area eight hundred years ago.

In the middle of the trip I searched for a wind swept juniper snag that I had originally photographed eighteen years earlier. It is the twisted skeleton of a tree that looks to have surrendered its foliage to the harsh climate decades before I first saw it.

Remarkably, I found it just as I had left it in 1996, every branch intact and still, I would have to say, the most perfectly sculptural tree I have ever come across in my search for form in nature.

It is perched on a ledge one thousand feet up a sheer escarpment. In 1996 I shot it in 35mm just before I started working with the large format camera that I have used ever since for all my landscape work. I wanted to shoot it again on the big camera’s 4″x5″ film (15 times larger than a 35mm slide) in order to capture the kind of clarity and shading that make seamless 40″ x 50″ prints possible. On my second session with the juniper, I was fortunate to find it isolated against the early fog of a hanging cloud left behind by an overnight storm.

The effect lasted only a few minutes as the cloud floated up the face of the cliff. That was enough to scramble down a bank, set the tripod, focus, and frame a composition that I had rehearsed at dusk the night before. I made two exposures. The second is the one you see in this gallery of the five new images I have added from this trip.

The music was Antonin Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9, “From the New World”. The conductor was Keith Lockhart who continues with the Pops and in 2010 added the title of Principal Conductor of the BBC Concert Orchestra to his assignments. He recently conducted the ensemble in Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee Concert.

As an outgrowth of the BSO commission I have produced a twelve and a half minute video piece edited to the Largo, or slow movement, of the Dvorak symphony. Again it is a montage of my landscape images, 107 this time, sized for large screen projection in the 4K format.

This is the standard for digital projection of feature films in commercial cinemas. The image is roughly four times the resolution of full high definition television.

The intent is to install this video piece in a dedicated space as a component of exhibits of my work. I have also created several other video projects based on some of my non-objective, camera-based images as well as a series of original paintings.

In April I traveled to the Southern Appalachians of Tennessee and North Carolina. I spent a week working to capture the first green haze of emerging leaves as spring progressed from lower to higher elevations in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I started and ended the trip in the bucolic gateway community of Townsend, TN (see iPhone photo above).

I was fortunate to arrive at the right time. The lower slopes were just beginning to go past, but the higher ridges were still in the leafless browns and grays of winter.

Having grown up around eastern hardwood forests, I had an image in my mind of the “pointillist” effect created by thousand of emerging leaves on the cusp of spring when the patterns of darker trunks and branches are still visible and give strong structure to the picture. All through the Smokies subtly contrasting shades of green, running from an electric lime hue to a warm bronze cast, were punctuated by the white of blooming dogwoods and magenta-pink of redbuds.

I exhibited a 40″ x 50″ print of one of these, MAPLE AND REDBUDS, EARLY SPRING, at Art Santa Fe in July. At that size, the detail and texture of the new leaves have quite an impact. Several people commented independently that it looked as if each individual leaf had been painted in by hand. Sadly, the effect is diminished in a 72 dpi jpeg on the computer screen.

In any case, I have photographed in the Appalachians and New England in the fall when the brilliant foliage draws visitors by the thousands, and the results are indeed spectacular. But I think there is also a strong case to be made for the quieter, but no less satisfying, imagery of early spring.

I recently delivered the largest print I have made to date—84 x 108 inches, or 7 by 9 feet. The piece was commissioned by Sharp HealthCare for their new downtown San Diego medical facility.

It hangs twenty feet above the floor in the building’s three story entrance lobby. It is also viewed from overlooking spaces on the second and third floors.

The photograph, SEASTACKS AND FOG, was shot on 4×5 film at low tide on a remote cove near Cape Scott at the northern tip of Vancouver Island, British Columbia. The trail to the beach winds though a towering temperate rain forest. Often this image evokes comparisons to the Chinese landscape art tradition.

The print was mounted by Fine Art Solutions of Los Angeles on a structure they fabricated with an aluminum back-frame. At something over 200 pounds, the piece posed a risky installation challenge which was handled expertly (read, VERY carefully) by Rob Markoff and crew of Artrageous in San Diego. They built a custom cradle on the basket of a scissors lift to raise and position the print before lowering it onto wall mounted cleats and securing it to withstand possible bouncing during earthquakes.

Several years ago the traditional Vietnamese artisans’ group La Than Imperial Embroidery recreated my photograph “Alpenglow on Hurricane Ridge” in thread. See the sidebar link on this site for background on the project.

Last April my wife Karen and I had a chance to see the piece for the first time in person during a visit to New York. I was overwhelmed by the detail and refinement that I had not been able to fully appreciate in the photos they had sent during the year-long making of the embroidery.

This detail of the seven foot wide piece is NOT my original photograph. This is the embroidery. Every minute feature of the flowers, grass, and background trees is created with thread. One of the revelations was that the surface has relief. In many places, the needleworkers used five or six layers of thread to capture the complex color and texture of the twilight scene.

The organizers, Jennifer Ha Than and Lawrence Gooberman, would like to place the work in an appropriate museum or corporate collection. Wherever it finds a home, I think it should be displayed with interpretive material on the embroidery tradition in Vietnam, how it was lost during thirty years of successive wars, and how Jennifer who came to the United States among the Boat People in the 70’s returned home to find the scattered artisans who still knew the technique and reorganized them to pursue this project.