Last year about this time David Griffin, National Geographic’s director of photography, and Elizabeth Krist, a senior photo editor, walked into my office and asked if I had any ideas on how we could photograph Stonehenge in a way that would be new and different. It was a natural question. David was already thinking about high-dynamic-range photography, and I’m the digital-tech guy at the magazine. I had an idea, but it came with a catch—I wanted to be the photographer, anything to get out of the office and into the field.
My idea started with a hand-built camera that had caught my interest at Photokina two years earlier—a panoramic film camera that had been adapted for digital use by Dr. Kurt Gilde in Germany. The camera can make a digital image that’s 49×90 millimeters wide using a sliding adapter mounted with a Phase One P45 digital back; three images stitched together result in a file with over 100 megapixels of resolution. I wanted to use this technology to capture three unique exposures at different times of the day and night, then stitch them into a continuous panoramic that showed Stonehenge over the course of time. Coincidentally the panoramic would fit perfectly on a magazine gatefold—three pages of a spread where one page folds in as a flap.
