I joined Scott Cowan on Exploring Washington State to talk about three decades photographing this state on film — and about the two cameras that made it possible, both of which are now out of production.

We got into the mechanics most people never ask about: how a swing-lens Noblex 135U differs from a Hasselblad XPan II, why I still trust only Velvia 50 after thirty years, and what it means to depend on a single repair technician — in his eighties — to keep aging camera bodies alive. I talked about apprenticing under Ken Duncan in Australia in the late '90s, processing images for America Wide, and how that shaped the way I see landscape now.

Scott and I also spent time on the places in this book that don't usually make the postcard rack — the Salmo-Priest Wilderness in fall, the camas fields at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in spring, the dunes near Hanford that almost nobody photographs. And we talked about Washington Wide itself: why I built it around the eastern half of the state as much as the western, and why I chose to self-publish and learn every step of production myself rather than hand it off.

Listen: Exploring Washington State — John Shephard, Washington Wide & Panoramic Photography

Washington Wide is available for preorder now at washingtonwide.com.