I had an awesome opportunity to do some more work with Kevin B. Howard Architects with a new high-end custom home.  It’s always a pleasure to work with the KBHA firm, as every little aspect of the home is just exquisite and simply just breathtaking (for a lack of better words). It was also a new chance to try out my new camera, the Canon 1Ds mkIII, Canon’s flagship 21.1 megapixel camera. Don’t be fooled by the larger megapixel this camera produces, as that isn’t what is really important in this day and age, but its more about the file quality, color reproduction and dynmic range. To date, nothing really comes close to what it can do, unless you make the jump to medium format digital backs which can cost $20k to $40k easily for just the camera setup. The builder, Desert West Construction, did such an exquisite job with all the details; you can thank Loftfield for that one!
Anyway, more about home. Definately a very contemporary home with exquisite design work in every aspect. The more I see the KBHA homes, the more I can see how much they put into them, and get a feel for their homes. Looking through a Tucson Home & Garden magazine, it’s becoming easier to pick out the KBHA homes for their distinct style.
Now, a little about my shooting style with architectural projects. I don’t limit myself to single frames, or even single exposures. The new camera can resolve a LOT more detail as far as exposure goes. You simply capture more data (14 bit files vs. 12 bit for the older cameras) in the highlights and shadows, thus reducing the need to have your exposures “stacked” with other exposures to retain certain areas. Also, I use special lenses that correct for parallax and distortion, so that the images are exactly true to scene. None of these crop-cameras and super wide-angle lenses and hope and pray that Photoshop will come to my rescue. The files you see below are pretty much straight out of the camera. The only processing done was to combine multiple frames to make one large panorama, which I call “stitching”. I take 4-5 images in succession of different parts of the scene, and then manually stitch them together to create one, giant, super-mega awesome file full of detail. They result in a whopping 52 megapixel file (much higher resolution than any 35mm film), something that you can’t buy these days
 If you know anything about printing, and the standard of 300dpi is pretty widely accepted as the minimum resolution for print (some will say 240dpi is fine) but more the better in some cases. If you were to print these at their native file size (no up-ressing here) they would print at nearly 18×36″ in the finest of detail. That’s more than 2 times the size of the standard camera size of 12×18″. I can’t wait to print one of these at 30×60″ and see how sharp it holds. It’ll blow you away
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