< heathpaleyphoto.com/contintental.html


My photo, Curved, recently won first place in the Water category at the Maine Photography Show in Boothbay, Maine. heathpaleyphoto.com/curves.html




My name is Heath Paley, and I am a Maine based landscape photographer who shoots large format landscapes wherever they occur: rural areas and cities; places of natural splendor, and man-made tableaus constructed entirely of materials whose extraction has often negatively impacted the environments they were taken from. My goal is to draw people in, immerse them, in the physical world, and by doing so, induce a reverberation in the viewer that briefly fractures his or her habitual way of seeing and feeling.

Over tens of thousands of years our bodies and minds evolved in a balanced reciprocity with their surroundings, but civilization and culture have largely broken this bond, leaving people adrift and estranged from the very source of their existence. The physical world has become something to wade through, or an idolized place of beauty off somewhere beyond the horizon. In either case, humans are separated, alienated from the places they inhabit, and this alienation, as David Abram says in, The Spell Of The Sensuous, "robs our senses of their integrity, and robs our minds of their coherence."

I strive to create images that play a role in reestablishing a sensual connection between people and their physical environment–not with some idealized space, but with specific locations, for I feel that restoring the link between humans and the animate world is an initial step toward the rebalancing of our relationship with the earth and its other inhabitants.

A photograph should affect the viewer whether it is displayed as a four by six inch post card or a four by six foot print. However, there is a size at which an image has its maximum and intended impact. This size depends on its subject, on its composition, and on its resolution. I have tried to create images that work within the limited confines of a computer monitor, but which come into their own when displayed at sizes in closer harmony with their subjects, their compositions, and especially their resolutions. My images expose their subjects in great detail, and this detail is not superfluous, it is central, it is at their core. In writing, detail pulls the reader in, involves him or her in the subject matter and in the intent of the author. It is the same with photography. People relate to specific visual detail–I use this detail to engage the viewer, and hopefully to initiate an interaction between the viewer and the physical world.

All of the images on this site are stitched together from multiple full frame 35 millimeter photographs. They are composed of as many as thirty individual shots. Stitching multiple photographs together allows me to combine the portability of the 35 millimeter world, with the high resolution of large format photography. Stitching also allows me to tailor the form factor (the width and height) of the final image to the scene not by forcing it into a particular form factor, or by cropping, but by choosing the adequate number of shots to fully portray the subject I am photographing. The primary benefit of stitching multiple shots together, however, is the amount of detail I can pour into an image, detail that holds up, and blooms when the image is displayed at its intended size.

As the poet Mary Oliver said, "I want to make poems that look into the earth and the heavens and see the unseeable. I want them to honor both the heart of faith, and the light of the world; the gladness that says, without any words, everything." (Everything, New And Selected Poems-Volume Two)

The intended size of these images makes them difficult to display on the web. All of the images are presented with their largest dimension (either the width or the height) set at 1000 pixels, so they appear relatively similar in size. They are displayed in this way so that they will fit on the normal computer monitor without a lot of scrolling. The actual sizes, however, vary greatly–the smallest (when printed at the standard size) is 24" by 16", and the largest is 84" by 24". One drawback to setting the largest dimension at 1000 pixels is that the wider panoramas appear small when compared to the more narrowly focused images. I have chosen to use Zoomify (Zoomify is a registered trademark of Zoomify, Inc.) to help mitigate this predicament because it allows me to display the images with a maximum dimension of 1000 pixels, but also gives the viewer the ability to zoom in on the detail that is the backbone of the image. In order for Zoomify to work you must have Flash Player v6 or higher installed on your computer.

The standard print size for each image is listed on its item page along with where and when it was taken. The print prices are based on the size of the standard print. All of these prints can be printed in a different size (larger or smaller) as long as the proportion between the width and the height remains the same. If you would like a print in a different size, it will be priced accordingly. To order a custom sized print please contact me via email or phone.

Please go to: heathpaleyphoto.com/info1.html for more information about my photography.

I welcome any comments or questions that you might have about the images shown here. You can contact me at: info@heathpaleyphoto.com