murals and megapixels.

So ... REI is opening a new store in Olympia, Washington next month and a month or so ago I was approached by the designer assigned to the store graphics if she could look through my images on Flickr to possibly use one or two. Now if I haven't made it terribly clear through this blog or over on my Flickr, I have never thought too highly of my own photography and consider myself more or less a complete hack etc. etc. etc. blah blah blah. So it clearly was the PR work of some folks at REI other than myself who pointed her to my stuff and her subsequent asking me to use a couple she had found that apparently her client (in this case, the visual team) actually apparently liked.

The funny part of course is that I do all of the retouching and prep work for all of the photos and signs found in all of the stores, so ... when this mural job came through I got to work on, well, my own photos for a change.

So this photo of Hidden Lake will grace the wall behind the store's cashwrap, while this pano of Rainier will hang above the front entrance -

But maybe the coolest part was the timing - about this same time I had been considering a DSLR with more res than my 20D - a 35-mm-esque, not-too-shabby 8MP that has served me so well these last almost-two-years since making the leap to more-or-less abandoning film (although I thought it was cool the designer kept selecting an image that I had shot with my trusty $40 Ciro-Flex TLR 6x6cm garage-sale medium-format camera that I would have had to rescan at a high-res in order to enlarge to the size she needed but that of course was totally doable since it was, well, medium-format film).

But anyway ... in order to be able to capture even more detail and blow up my photos even bigger (yeah, than four hundred-something inches), I needed more than 8MP ... so an immediate follow-up opportunity to score a used Canon 7D - with a more-like-medium-format-18MP sensor - presented itself and I lept at it. And in the process realized how I have never - umm, as in ever - bought a new piece of photo equipment. Ever. Garage sales. Craigslist. Hand-me-downs. Etc. Yeah - I'm cheap, I know. It was a leap last year to buy two additional lenses, but I - well - bought both of them used so there.

So in testing out the new-to-me 7D, I have to admit I've come to the conclusion that it is an awesome piece of kit. Feels solid. Feels pro. The shutter makes a quiet-but-satisfying kunk. The screen is lightyears more impressive than the tiny one on my 20D. There are three custom all-settings options right on the mode dial. It of course shoots HD video. And so on. But all of this makes me sort of laugh and cringe at the same time when I slap on my cheap, plastic Canon lenses ... that is, until I remember just how bloody awesome those cheap, plastic lenses are when viewing a recent pano I shot (still taken with the 20D though) up at Baker when we hauled it up there last month for the annual snowcamping trip -

That's a screenshot viewed at 100% in Photoshop - it's so tack-sharp and full of detail I could stare around at it on-screen at that size for hours peering into and at all the shadows and trees and folds of snow and depressions of crevasses and on and on. Cheap plastic lens my *** - that 55-250mm Canon deal is the, well - real deal (on a Canon APS-C crop sensor, of course). I think some people tend to get too worked up over having the most expensive gear ...

But anyway - I'm excited for another year of shooting (and yes, I know - the irony of being excited to shoot photos that I am also convinced have already been taken better by others and millions of times before me doesn't necessarily make sense) - the 7D will be awesome to heft along with those plastic lenses and my kick-arse Canon 10-22mm ultra-wide on all those trips I have penciled in already for the upcoming season.

And it'll be fun to wander down to the new store when it opens to check out my, err, REI's new murals ...