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Blake Peterson of 425 Magazine has written a feature on Washington Wide. We talked over Zoom in late August, and the piece covers more ground than I expected.
It starts at 5 a.m. in the Skagit Valley in 1998, where I met Ken Duncan setting up a camera I'd never seen anything like. That meeting turned into a three-year collaboration and sent me toward panoramic photography, which I've shot ever since because our eyes see panoramically.
The article also covers what the book is about. Washington has glaciers, coast, high desert, and prairie inside one set of borders, and most books on the state stick to the Cascades and the coast. Washington Wide spans all of it, in six sections, across thirty years of film. Every frame was shot on Fujichrome Velvia 50 with a Noblex 135U or a Hasselblad XPan II and scanned by Michael Strickland.
It also tells two stories from the field: a Seattle sunrise shot from the top of an apartment building, and the people in Whitman County who pointed me to places I'd never have found on my own.
Read the feature in 425 Magazine →
Washington Wide is a 172-page hardcover with a foreword by Randy Lewis, and it ships now. Order at washingtonwide.com.
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Washington Wide is now on the shelf at Trail's End Bookstore in Winthrop. Thank you to for carrying it.
If you haven't been inside, go. It's a Western storefront on a wooden boardwalk, the kind of place you don't want to rush through. Fall is the time to make the trip. The larch and cottonwood color in the Methow Valley is some of the best in the state right now, and Winthrop is worth the drive on its own.
Trail's End Bookstore
241 Riverside Ave, Winthrop, WA
Washington Wide is a 172-page hardcover of panoramic Washington State landscapes, with a foreword by Randy Lewis. If you can't make it to Winthrop, you can pre-order at washingtonwide.com.
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I joined Perrin Adams on the Great Big Photography World podcast for Episode #298, "The Patience of Panoramic Film." We talked about shooting panoramic slide film in Washington for thirty years and how that turned into Washington Wide.
We start with Ken Duncan and America Wide. When I was his assistant, he wanted to photograph the Statue of Liberty at a specific time, and it was closed. He told me to figure it out. That took calls to the Navy, two states, and the Coast Guard, and we got in. I've carried that lesson ever since: if you want the shot, go after it and don't put obstacles in your own way.
From there we get into the gear. I shoot Velvia 50 on a Hasselblad XPan II and a Noblex swing-lens camera, all on a tripod. The one person I trust to repair them is in his eighties and lives in Texas, so I've learned to improvise. When a small brass battery contact went missing from the Noblex, a piece of aluminum foil kept it running.
We also talk about what it took to get from slides to a printed book. The CMYK proofs were frustrating at first, and I learned the out-of-gamut warnings in Photoshop were more conservative than the files needed. I laid out about 85 small prints on the floor and sequenced the book by color, starting with blues and moving through greens and yellows into reds.
I also say why I'll eventually move to digital, and why I'll shoot film as long as I can.
Washington Wide is a 172-page hardcover with a foreword by Randy Lewis, and it ships now. Order at washingtonwide.com.