When my friend and I were helping a relative clean his apartment, this print of The Blue Ridge Mountains, Asheville North Carolina nearly ended up in the trash. I have lost a great number of beautiful images due to a computer hard disk failure, and this was one of them. So this print is a one-of-a-kind. This was from my photography and printing days.

I had two different photos of this scenery. The other one, very large one, is hanging somewhere in Asheville North Carolina. Using techniques that I have learned from other photographers and printers, I enlarged an aggressively cropped image for a 15 by 48 inches print. Even up close, it was not easy to see that it was enlarged from an aggressively cropped photo.

Then I experimented with black and white photography and making black and white prints, but my prints were not like all other prints because mine were printed on a modified printer that had 7 different values of greys. It was an expensive modification but it was worth it because the tonal range was very wide. I was a master of my digital craft. I knew how to manipulate an image for a print. Alas, people were not interested in my photography, so I set it aside to continue with my painting.

“At the end of the day, no one gets a prize for simply getting it accurate. A bit of artistic theatrics can go a long way in making a painting a piece of artwork instead of just another picture.”—Richard McKinley