I want my photographs to be rich in texture and detail, as well as subtle in tonal quality, and I like to have more control over focus and perspective than a rigid-body camera affords. I therefore work with large format view cameras (4x5" and 8x10") where I can. Where these are too cumbersome or too slow, I resort to 2-1/4" or 35mm and, more recently, to a digital SLR. The landscapes are almost all large format, the animal series are 35mm, the color work is digital as well as large format film.

The old adage "Expose for the shadows and develop for the highlights" continues to hold for black & white film. Its most venerated implementation is Ansel Adams and Fred Archer's "Zone System", made popular through Adams's writings. Though full of admiration for its inventors, I am no partisan of the system. This is not so much because the system is clumsy, but rather because its conceptual underpinnings are incoherent. The word "zone", as used by Adams and his followers, refers to different things in different contexts, which leads to theoretical confusion and to dubious practical advice. (For example, for scenes whose luminance range is smaller or greater than the "normal" 7 stops, one zone no longer equals one stop, and the exposure and development recommendations vary depending on which "zone" is used to anchor the low values.) I prefer the theoretically satisfying and very elegant method described in Phil Davis's excellent book Beyond The Zone System.

The strategy for color negative film is simple because contrast cannot be changed during development: expose for the shadows and let the highlights fall where they will. I avoid color slide film because of its comparatively small dynamic range.

I used to be a staunch partisan of the wet darkroom, where I printed many of my negatives with unsharp masks (slightly fuzzy low-contrast contact prints of the negatives onto sheet film), a technique I learned from Howard Bond. This allows subtle manipulation of contrast and enhances apparent image sharpness and detail. (Surprisingly, pictures look sharper when the right amount of blur is added in the right places.) I toned the prints in selenium and a variety of home brews (mostly thiocarbamide) for archival permanence as well as image color. Since 2005, I have pretty much converted to digital pigment printing. The digital controls had been beckoning for a long time (imagine, among countless other tools, unsharp masking with no less than three parameters at the click of a button!), but what won me over is that digital printer technology has finally sufficiently matured to be able to compete with darkroom chemistry. This took much longer for b&w than for color, but now a well-crafted b&w digital print can, in my view, hold its own against a darkroom print. And more often than not, the digital print shows up the imperfections of the darkroom print. The judgment required to transform a dull negative into a luminous print remains the same in the digital world that it was in the analog world, it's just that the former offers much more sophistication along the way and permits coffee breaks at any time. The drawback is, or course, that there is no end to refinements, which is why I now spend more time on a given image than ever before. To get an inkling of print quality, go to zoom.