Someone once told me that the beauty of life is in the details.
Now I’ve always thought of myself as a big picture sort of guy,
but over time I have come to appreciate the little things in life
and this has become a motto for me of sorts.
So as I stand here beneath Landscape Arch,
one of the longest sandstone arches in the world,
I’m deeply impressed by its incredible height and length,
and I notice every little layer, crack and crevasse,
and I wonder how such a delicate structure could remain standing for so long.
I suppose that’s one of the many reasons I enjoy landscape photography so much.
At once, a grand vista can immediately take my breath away,
but I also see that the landscape is really made up of a million little things that come together to create the whole of it.
A twisted cedar tree, a craggy rock,
and add to that, light, and atmosphere,
and you can understand why I can’t help but want to photograph it.
The beauty of a photograph is that even years after I make an image,
I can return again and again to a scene like this,
to recall all kinds of splendid details,
even long after the sunrise is over.
I’m a photographer,
and I appreciate cameras that are built well, with care and craftsmanship.
A camera needs to withstand the rigors of the day to day,
the hot sun, and the cold rain.
It’s a tool I use to create images, my art,
It's the brush I use to express the way I feel and to share the wonders I’ve seen.
I like a camera that sees the world the way I see it.
It needs to travel with me wherever I go,
and it needs to be ready whenever I want to capture the precious moments in time
I have the pleasure to experience.
A camera can be a work of art in itself.
It’s made up of a million little things that work together to take a picture.
And when I’m working with a finely crafted Camera,
and when I can feel all those little parts working together to release the shutter,
there is a great sense of satisfaction, that something wonderful has just taken place.
And if the beauty of life really is in the details,
I want a camera that helps me draw out those details,
to record them, and to recall them
whenever I feel the urge, to share a sunset.
I stopped in at Pictureline, our premier camera dealer in Salt Lake City Utah.
There, my friend and fellow photographer Dave Ward
lined me up with the new FujiFilm, GFX100s.
Not only is it a beautiful camera, that fit perfectly in my hands,
I was impressed with how light it was for such a substantial camera.
We set up some time at the studio of Marc Reynolds, an amazing portrait photographer,
and we asked our friend Kylie to join us because I wanted to see how the Fuji would do with skin tones and colors.
The 100s was easy to work with.
The menus were logical,
and the programable buttons and dials were placed exactly where I like them.
But more importantly, I was astonished at how good the images looked.
Using a simple setup with natural light,
the 102MP sensor rendered the colors and tones faithfully,
and the tonal transitions were remarkably smooth.
And all those pixels mean exceptional detail.
The GF lenses are incredibly sharp and easily resolved every eyelash, and every smile to perfection.
Kylie is such a natural beauty,
I was so pleased to have a camera that complimented her and helped me to create some stunning portraits.
We left the studio and followed the tracks out west
to change our setup and to work with some outdoor lighting
and enjoy what was shaping up to be another amazing Utah sunset.
Dave and I took turns like two kids on Christmas morning with a shiny new toy.
Working with a single strobe for some added fill light,
we shot with the changing conditions as the sun moved toward the horizon.
Low light never became an issue,
and the larger than full-frame sensor, along with the fast GF lenses
gave us excellent control over depth of field,
and the kinds of perspectives I like with larger format cameras.
The shoot couldn’t have gone any better
and as the setting sun filled the sky with its warm and comforting light,
we walked away, please with the performance of the 100S,
and the images we were able to capture.
The GFX 100s and the GF lenses are a great combination.
They're really sharp and they look really, really good.
They are nice and contrasty
they resolve every detail that the 100-megapixel sensor can throw at it.
The GFX lenses are truly an amazing lens.
The next day, Dave and I made our way south to an old gas station built in the 1930s.
I brought my Harley along with the idea
of making a large metal print from the image we were going to create.
We brought along a number of strobes and speed lights, gels and other light modifiers.
We did a little light painting, and we took many shots,
placing the strobes in different positions to highlight various details of the set-up.
This collaboration was exceptionally fun because Dave has such a creative mind,
so we constantly bounced ideas off of each other as we built our image one step at a time.
Later, I would use six separate shots and with layer masks,
combine them in photoshop to create the final image.
I’m a landscape photographer at heart,
but I enjoy exploring many genres of photography,
and the GFX 100s proved to be such a versatile camera,
it became the ideal companion for so much of what I wanted to do.
I headed back to Moab Utah because I wanted a sunset image of Delicate Arch,
another famous structure
that has been photographed a million times by millions of people.
So I arrived close to evening and began to search for an angle I hadn’t really seen before.
Finding a view I liked, I set up the camera and went to work.
And that’s when I noticed, the myriad of details that make this arch such an Icon.
Every layer, every variation in color, every crack, and every weather-worn grain of sand,
was there to create a magnificent work of art, etched in stone.
The GFX100s rendered every splendid detail with such precision,
while capturing the vivid colors of this desert landscape
in such a way that the images I created will bring me back to this place,
this evening, yes this very moment in time, again and again.
You see, the beauty of life, really is in the details.