Jeff Gaydash's photostream Pro User

St. Agnes, Detroit, Michigan

In the early 1990's I spent several years documenting historic churches for a book project called "A Threatened Legacy: Detroit's Historic Churches." The purpose of the project was to document historic structures that were being threatened to be closed and sometimes demolished due to the severe population decline of the city of Detroit. Now over fifteen years later I have decided to revisit many of these places (among others) that have since fallen into decay.

My version of street photography. Beauty is everywhere.

A rare look from deep in my archives. This platinum print was made about 15 years ago using a high resolution halftone negative made from a digital image file. It was one of many tests I made as I was searching for a solution to make platinum prints from digital files.

At first, the halftone negative appeared to be a valid (and cost effective) solution, but one will soon discover by looking at the image with a loupe (click here for full size image) that the halftone process is not continuous tone, but a simulation of continuous tone through the use of varying sizes and spacing of dots.

Platinum printing is revered by photographers and collectors because of their unmatched tonal range, surface quality and archival permanence. That being said, photographic purists would find making platinum prints with halftone negatives a blasphemous endeavor.

Shortly after this I discovered Piezography which was the first purely digital black & white printing process that produced results that rivaled traditional processes. I have not looked back since... until now...

I was contacted by a design firm in Rome, Italy who wished to license my image Seven Factors of Awakening for an interior redesign of the Spa at the Mandarin Oriental Luxury Hotel in London.

The problem was they wanted it printed twice, at approx. 7X10 feet to fill an entire wall and my original file would not hold up to my standards at this size. Luckily this location was close to home and fairly easy for me to reshoot at higher resolution. I used a D800E and some creative stitching techniques with my 85mm PC-E Nikkor to achieve a final file size for printing that is 18780 X 12402 pixels. That is a whopping 233 megapixel file!

I ultimately prefer this version over the original but the client wanted me to closer match the softness in the original image, so the version I sent them was captured with a much longer exposure which significantly softened the cascading water.

St. Agnes, Detroit, Michigan

In the early 1990's I spent several years documenting historic churches for a book project called "A Threatened Legacy: Detroit's Historic Churches." The purpose of the project was to document historic structures that were being threatened to be closed and sometimes demolished due to the severe population decline of the city of Detroit. Now over fifteen years later I have decided to revisit many of these places (among others) that have since fallen into decay.