About the National Parks project

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Frequently asked questions about the National Parks project

What is the National Parks project ?

The National Parks project is a unique effort by photographer QT Luong (me) to document and interpret each of the 58 National Parks of the United States in a unprecedented level of depth and detail, using when possible a 5x7 large format camera. In Sept 2002, a decade after starting the project, I achieved the goal of visiting each of the National Parks at least once (and at least twice for more than 50 of them) This is the first time a single person has photographed all the 58 US National Parks with a large format camera.

How did you get interested in the US Parks ?

I was born in France. After I completed my PhD, I wanted to spend a couple years in the USA, to see what this most dominant country was all about. At that time, I was an avid mountaineer and climber. I even had a government certification for guiding. As I didn't know much about the geography of the USA, one of the few places I kept hearing about from other climbers was Yosemite. At the beginning of 1993, I came to the University of California at Berkeley, since of all the top US research universities, it was the closest to Yosemite.

Yosemite was therefore the first park I visited, and I would subsequently return to there time and time again to explore its vertical world, as well as to hike and cross-country ski. In the spring of 1993, I visited my second National Park, Denali, to climb Mt McKinley solo. While my focus during those first parks visits was on mountaineering, after my visit to Death Valley in the fall of 1993, and then a whirlwind trip to southern Utah in the winter of 1993, I began to realize how interesting the National Parks system was, as a whole. Growing up in France, I had never seen deserts before. I am trememdously inspired by the diversity of the world.

What is the motivation for the project ?

I thrive looking for new experiences. After spending so much time in the glacial atmosphere of steep high mountain faces, I was drawn to the natural diversity offered by the National Parks, as I noticed that each environment gave rise to distinct new emotions. They represented all aspects of a vast continent with large tracts of wilderness: deserts and rain forests, Tropics and Arctic, soaring mountains and pancake-flat areas where a pass is 4 foot above sea level. The contrasts were endless compared to what I was used to in Europe, where the last remnants of wilderness are found only in the mountains. Even just the forests in California were a source of wonder, with the tallest, largest and oldest trees in the world, whereas in Europe we didn't even have any virgin forest anymore.

A few years later, as I had to limit my climbing activities after developing a debilitating case of keyboard-related RSI (Repetitive Stress Injury), I was eager to find a different outlet for the wilderness skills I developed during more than a decade of intense mountaineering. I enjoyed the challenges of planning and traveling to a number of remote locations, each with their own logistical problems. There was also the intellectual curiosity of finding out what makes each place special and unique in the larger picture of things. By that time, I had fallen in love with the National Parks so much that after the end of my tenure at Berkeley, I decided to extend my stay in the USA long enough for me to visit all of them.

In the summer of 1993, following an American tradition of landscape photography well exemplified by Ansel Adams, I had learned to use the large format camera. On the trip to Death Valley, I exposed one of my first sheets of 5x7 film at Badwater. A surprisingly successful mid-day image, the detail in the large transparency amazed me, as I felt I was able to see more detail in it than when I was at the actual scene.

Like Galen Rowell before, I initially picked up photography as a means to communicate to people who weren't there the wonders I had seen on the high peaks. Likewise, I also wanted to document the Parks in a way that would do justice to their splendor. I soon found out found out that many of the Parks had not been photographed with both a very high level of vision and technical quality. I decided to try to remedy this situation by photographing all the Parks in large format as my personal contribution to their celebration and preservation.

Tell me a little more about the logistics...

The project involved a lot of driving, many many road trips. I haven't kept track, but this is certainly over 100000 miles. When you think about National Parks, you first think of the wilderness, but in America, a lot of things are made for the automobile. Many of the beautiful places are not very far from a road engineered to make them accessible to the general public... which is convenient when you have so much of heavy camera equipment.

But yet, I don't drive beyond the continental divide (I am based in the San Francisco Bay Area), and there are the islands and Alaska, so the total I flew dozens of times (enough to get a couple of free bonus flights per year), including more than a dozen of segments in those small aircraft that are used in areas of Alaska where you cannot get there by any road because there are none for hundreds of miles around. I also boarded a great number of ferries and smaller motor boats. The part of air travel that I do not enjoy is to have to lug around up to two monster "body bags" filled up with photo gear, camping backpacking and backpacking necessities, and sometimes specialized outdoor gear, but although my wife is still horrified at them, I have learned over the years how to cope.

But often, that's just the beginning, and then to get to some places, you just have to hike for a day or backpack for a week, sometimes with a 70lbs pounds pack in tailless terrain. More specialized trips involved climbing to such heights as the summit of Mount Mc Kinley, paddling a kayak and inflatable canoe, and getting wet snorkeling and scuba diving. With the exception of a few week-long wilderness trips in Alaska, where it was so remote that I wouldn't have met any other people if I was not with a partner, in general I prefer to travel alone.

Overall, I planned all the expeditions by myself, without ever hiring a guide, and using only in a few cases chartered transportation, when no other options were possible. On the road, I almost never stayed in motels, but rather camped out, often without a tent, even in the middle of winter, not only for savings, but also to be the closest possible to the environment I was seeking.

I financed the project entirely myself, using at first income from a job as a professional computer science researcher. Expenses were not really a problem, since I travel in a very efficient (read cheap :-)) way. Time would have been one, however, this job, semi-academic in nature, afforded me enough flexibility so that I could go on several two-week long trips each year. It is only in the latter years of the project that I began to realize that the images, initially conceived as a labor of love, could be commercialized, and then began to make the transition towards full-time professional photography. Nowadays, I derive all my income from photography.

Hasn't it been done before ? There are tons of published photos of the National Parks.

Ansel Adams himself was commissioned by the US government to photograph all the national parks, however this was in the forties and there were much less national parks than now (he still managed to miss one).

Almost all contemporary books about the National Parks are compilations of images by different photographers. A single photographer working on the project can bring to bear his own personal vision, and put each of the parks in a bigger context, therefore being more perceptive to what makes a particular place unique. While the most popular parks like Yosemite or Yellowstone have been over-photographed, there is surprisingly little photographic coverage of the less accessible or less known parks. Even within the well-known parks, the coverage is mostly photographs taken from nearby the road. I always try to spend at least some time in the backcountry.

To the best of my knowledge (please correct me if I am wrong), 54 of National Parks have been photographed by Stan Jorstad (3 more Parks were designated subsequently), making him the only person other to have completed the project, using medium-format cameras. David Muench, the doyen of American color landscape photography, has photographs most of the National Parks, but not all. For that reason, his last 2005 book "Our National Parks" used some of my own images. Both those photographers used cameras which do not capture images with the same resolution as my 5x7.

So what is the 5x7 camera, and why would it be superior ?

First, the 5x7 camera produces an original transparency (a piece of film) of 5x7 inches (12.7cm x 17.8cm), which records an amazing amount of detail, 25 times what is contained in a regular 24mm x 36mm frame. The information contained in each frame would fill-up easily entirely a CD (700M). You would probably need a 100 Megapixel digital camera to capture as much detail. Second, the LF camera is not rigid because the lens is connected to the film plane with a bellows, like the "box cameras" used in the 19th century. This let the photographer control the perspective and the distribution of sharpness in a way which cannot be achieved with a regular camera.

Trying to appreciate the quality of a print obtained from 5x7 on the web is a bit like trying to appreciate the sound of a high-end audio system through the phone, but this page of examples of large format photographs should give you an idea of it.

Do you use exclusively the 5x7 camera ?

Although it can produce superior results, the 5x7 camera is not suitable for every subject and situation. The camera needs to be used on a tripod. The set-up is somewhat time-consuming, requiring anticipation of conditions, and making it difficult to capture fast changing conditions. Since everything is manual, one has to be careful, as it is extremely easy to make a mistake which would ruin the image. There are more controls than in normal cameras, resulting in more complex creative decisions. The gear is quite bulky and heavy (a typical bag complete with camera, lenses, tripod, film holders, and other accessories, weights close to 50lbs). Because of the absence of real-time viewing and the difficulty of using long lenses, the 5x7 camera is in general not suitable for wildlife photography. The limited depth of field at higher magnifications makes its use problematic for many close-ups as well. Another difficulty is the need for long exposure times, which is problematic in windy conditions.

For those technical reasons, there are a number of situations when using the 5x7 is not practical. In that case, I use a 35mm camera that I always carry in my kit. This camera is currently the Canon EOS 1Ds mark 3. While the quality certainly surpasses 35mm film, making the images suitable for many applications, it cannot match by far the detail of the 5x7 camera.

What about digital photography ?

There are two categories of digital cameras that are radically different: the instant-shot cameras that expose the image during the brief opening of a shutter, and large format scanning backs, that basically work like a flatbed scanner mounted inside a large format camera.

Even the most advanced instant-shot cameras (that cost upwards of $30,000) have not caught up with 5x7 film in terms of resolution.

When usable, the scanning backs indeed produce very high-quality images, however, if you had a device that required accessories such as battery packs and laptop computer, and took long exposure times even in bright sunlight and tens of minutes in less strong light, necessitating the sturdiest tripod and making it impossible to photograph anything moving, you would certainly welcome a device that doesn't use electricity, is compact and light enough to be carried by a solo photographer in the backcountry together with food and gear for an extended outing, and capture images in fractions of seconds to a few seconds instead of dozens of seconds to minutes. In other words, if you had today's digital large format scanning backs, you would see the "ancient" film technology as a technical breakthrough for the purpose of photographing wild landscapes. Stephen Johnson's project, much talked about because of his pionnering use of a digital scanning back, resulted in the coverage of barely more than half of the Parks despite large resources, and was quite limited in scope by his very choice of those tools. Digital backs might yield higher resolution files, but when scanned properly, a good old piece of 5x7 film is still capable of producing stunningly sharp prints at the size of at least 50x70 inches.

What is your favorite National Park ?

Frankly, it's difficult to say, because they are so different. If I was to pick a park, this would be Yosemite. The place is beautiful in all seasons and all scales, its deservedly famous views with cliffs and waterfalls are among the most spectacular in America. It offers a lifetime of climbing and hiking. What makes it special to me is that it was the first National Park I had heard of and visited, and the time I have spent there on repeated visits.

Other favorites:

Capitol Reef offers more variety than any other park on the Colorado Plateau, which itself is probably the most unique area in America.
Acadia has the highest diversity/size ratio of any park, with mountains, lakes, a dramatic coatline, and forests and shrubs that turn out beautiful fall colors.
Denali is vast and wild, with the most magnificent mountain range in North America and superb wildlife.

What equipment did you use and why ?

My format of choice, 5x7, has an aspect ratio that I find ideally suitable for landscapes, while the area size of the original transparency is almost twice as large as the 4x5 used my most large format photographers. It yields transparencies that are large enough to enjoy on the light table. Looking at them that way, I often see details that escaped my bare eye when standing at the scene, and this brings back wonderful visual memories.

I use a wooden camera hand-assembled by Keith Canham of Mesa, AZ. It is one of the most light (6 lbs) and compact 5x7 camera around that is fully featured, with a complete range of adjustments and the capability to accommodate a wide range of lenses. My assortment of lenses range from 90mm to 720mm, and include optics from each of the 4 major manufacturers (Nikkor 90/8, Schneider 110/5.6, Rodenstock 150/5.6, Schneider 210/5.6, Nikkor 300/9, Fuji 450/12.5, Nikkor 720T/16), however the lens I use for more than half of my images is the Schneider Super-symmar XL 110/5.6, the equivalent of a 24mm lens in 35mm. This lens is demanding, because so much of the scene is included that all the elements have to fit together, but those are the conditions I am striving for.

I work exclusively in color, for I find it a crucial part of the visual experience. Like many landscape photographers, I have used extensively Fuji Velvia, for its vivid colors that seem good at matching the memories of a scene. However, these days, I use exclusively Fuji Astia. This film provides me with a more natural palette. Interestingly, I find that while in smaller formats, this film, because of its less saturated palette, does not match the colors that the mind perceived in a natural landscape, in a 5x7 transparency, the precise rendition of the textures, identical or better than what can be observed at the scene, is just right to recreate the visual experience of being there. Technically, Fuji Astia has three important advantages, first it holds almost more full stop of contrast more than Velvia, making it in particular easier to retain shadow detail in full light or sky detail in overcast conditions, second, the full additional shutter speed is very useful for freezing the motion of vegetation, and third, the reciprocity failure corrections are not necessary until 30s exposures, while Velvia definitively needs them starting from 10s.

The only filters that are use are the polarizer and a variety of Graduated Neutral Density filters. These days, I find that minor color correction are best left for the (digital) darkroom. Digital tools give the color photographer a degree of fine control that is very difficult to achieve in the traditional darkroom, and makes it possible to make prints that best matches my intentions.

I always carry a 35mm system together with the 5x7 system. Although I used Nikon in the past, I switched to Canon EF a few years back, because they offered lenses that were just not available in the Nikon line at that time (and took five years for Nikon to match). I find that a 35mm camera with a zoom lens makes a useful viewfinding tool, as well as a precise meter with an excellent interface. I use an incident meter almost only for close-ups in even light.

For more details and pictures of equipment, see inside QT Luong's general-purpose large format camera bag on lfphoto.info.

Are you going to publish a book ?

I will release a book in the next few years, with around 500 photos and some interpretative text. However, I still need to return to some parks for which I do not have a sufficient variety of photographs. I don't want to rush the project because I'd like the book to stand as a reference for many years. I didn't begin to look for a publisher. If you are one or know one who might be interested in working with me, please contact me. In the while, I am conducting a survey to evaluate interest.