Watson and Howard use a large-format 4-by-5-inch view camera and attach a BetterLight scanning back in the slot where the large sheet film traditionally goes. The scanner is tethered to a 10-GB hard drive hooked up to a laptop where the photographers monitor and make adjustments to their work.

Each image is at least 140 MB -- a massive file size. By contrast, a typical high-resolution JPEG file taken with a 5-megapixel camera is around 4 MB.

"One of the reasons the photos are of such exceptionally high resolution is that the BetterLight scanning back records all three colors equally, where a one-shot digital camera records 50 percent green and 25 percent each of red and blue pixels. The software then tries to make up the color deficiencies by interpolating the data," said Watson.

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