The Daily Feather — Bigger Pictures
In the spring and summer of 2006, six photographers – the Legacy Project Collaborative – and hundreds of volunteers, artists and experts spent thousands of hours transforming a Southern California military jet hangar at Marine Corps Air Station El Toro in Irvine into a gigantic camera. The aim: Snap the largest black-and-white photograph ever. Subjects depicted in the final copy included El Toro’s control tower, twin runways, and the heart of the future Orange County Great Park, with a backdrop of the San Joaquin Hills and the Laguna Beach Wilderness. To accomplish this feat, the group hand-applied 80 liters of gelatin silver halide emulsion that were custom-made in Germany to a seamless substrate weighing 1,200 pounds. Development required a custom Olympic pool-sized developing tray, ten high-volume submersible pumps and 1,800 gallons of black-and-white chemistry. Completed on July 8, 2006, The Great Picture for the record books was a canvas measuring 31 feet 5 inches high by 107 feet 5 inches wide, or 3,375-square-foot.
While we can’t boast of having drawn anything of such dimensions, our unwavering goal is to always make an impact through the visual lens. The problem is most of the dry science depicts data releases myopically – from one to the next., sequentially. Why not wide-angle to frame broader cyclical trends?