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Washington Wide is now available at the Trillium Store, the gift shop at Bellevue Botanical Garden. Thank you to the Garden and the Bellevue Botanical Garden Society for carrying it.
The Trillium Store carries gifts, books, and work by local artists. Every purchase supports the Society’s educational programs and community events and helps pay for improvements to the Garden. It’s a good fit for this book, and a good reason to spend a fall afternoon in Bellevue.
Washington Wide is 172 pages of panoramic photographs shot on Fujichrome Velvia 50 film over more than thirty years, with a foreword by Randy Lewis. It covers glaciers, coast, high desert, and prairie, because one state holds more variety than most people expect.
Trillium Store at Bellevue Botanical Garden
12001 Main St, Bellevue, WA
October hours: daily, 10am to 4pm (closing at 3pm on October 31)
Society members save 10% at the store.
bellevuebotanical.org/gift-shop
Prefer to order from home? Get your copy at washingtonwide.com, and I’ll ship it to you.
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Washington Wide is headed to the Olympic Peninsula. The Port Angeles Fine Arts Center will carry the book, and I’m glad to have it there. Thank you to the team at PAFAC.
The Center is a gallery, arts center, and sculpture park in one. The Esther Webster Gallery hosts rotating exhibits, and Webster’s Woods Sculpture Park is open from dawn to dusk every day. It’s a good stop on a trip to Port Angeles, and the fall programming is worth planning around.
Washington Wide is 172 pages of panoramic photographs shot on Fujichrome Velvia 50 film over more than thirty years. It covers glaciers, coast, high desert, and prairie, and it was made to show how different one state can be from one end to the other. Randy Lewis wrote the foreword.
Port Angeles Fine Arts Center
1203 E. Lauridsen Blvd, Port Angeles, WA
Gallery hours: Thursday through Sunday, 11am to 5pm
pafac.org
If you can’t make the trip, you can order at washingtonwide.com.
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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.
Washington Wide is also available to 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.
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Washington Wide has been accepted into the reference collection at Western Washington University's Center for Pacific Northwest Studies, housed in the Goltz-Murray Archives Building in Bellingham. A copy has been acquired for the Center's permanent holdings, joining WWU's broader collection on the region's history, culture, and landscape.
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In 1998, I was shooting in the Skagit Valley tulip fields when I ran into a photographer standing on his camera case with an enormous Linhof Technorama 617 — Ken Duncan, the Australian landscape photographer, who was deep into a book documenting the entire United States. He needed an assistant. A few months and a resume later, I was in Montana and Idaho learning what it actually takes to do this for real: little sleep, long hikes, more gear than seems reasonable. That trip is where I understood that if I wanted to make photography a career, I had to get serious about it.
Marc and I talked through why I shoot panoramic — the Noblex 135U's 136-degree swing-lens view and the Hasselblad XPan II's 71 degrees both mimic how we actually see, and that's the point. I want a viewer to feel like they're standing next to me, not looking at a postcard.
We also got into what makes Washington worth thirty years of attention: the Cascades split the state into two entirely different climates, temperate rainforest on one side and high desert on the other, and most books of this state only show you the wet half. One of my favorite places in the book is the Salmo-Priest Wilderness, tucked into the state's northeast corner on the Canadian and Idaho borders — grizzly country, an eight-hour drive from Seattle, and about as far from the Rainier-and-Olympic postcard version of Washington as you can get.
Listen: FujiLove Podcast, Episode 196 — Interview with John Shephard
Washington Wide is in preorder now — use code FUJILOVE for 10% off at washingtonwide.com.
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Washington Wide has been accepted into the University of Washington Libraries Special Collections, as part of their Pacific Northwest Collection.
It's a fitting home. The Pacific Northwest Collection exists to preserve the visual and written record of this region — and thirty years of panoramic photography across Washington State, built one sheet of Velvia 50 at a time, belongs in that record. This isn't a bookstore placement or a retail order. It's the book entering the archive, available to researchers, historians, and anyone tracing how this place has looked and changed over three decades.
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Washington Wide is now on the shelves at two Third Place Books locations: Lake Forest Park and Seward Park.
Both stores were early supporters of the book, and it's good company — Third Place has built its name on backing independent and regional titles. If you're in the neighborhood, stop in and pick up a copy in person.
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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.