If you've been following along on Facebook or Twitter you may have seen a handful of photos shot with my phone at Lake Eklutna, which is a couple drainages over from my home. I was fortunate to be in the company of David Taylor a terrific photographer who, as the proprietor of Sixtyone North, leads some very interesting Alaska photography tours and workshops. Along with the iPhone, I also brought a 4x5 view camera and a Holga that shoots 6x6cm film. Dave was shooting with a high-end Canon dSLR. You might say we had our bases covered photographically speaking.

I've written before about phone photography in connection with social media, but strangely, I've never tried to print a photo from my phone. I always assumed they would look so bad that it wouldn't be worth the effort. I was wrong. At an appropriate size and with some digital massaging, the little files from from my iPhone produce a rather attractive 4x5 print.

Huge prints are de rigueur for the landscape photographer and photographers often overlook the value of the small print. A small print is a completely different experience. A 40x60 inch print asks you to take a step back, be impressed with its magnitude, and then take in its details section by section. It asks you to admire the epic amount of information it can contain and hopes to amaze and stagger you. On the other hand, the small print invites the viewer to step closer. It whispers, 'pay no attention to the details, I am intended as a gestalt experience.' It is a Chopin Mazurka, rather than a Bruckner Symphony.

I suspect there are several reasons why the large print is so common among landscape photographers. First, and maybe foremost, photographers are a technical bunch. They are not shy about impressing with craft and a large, sharp print requires excellent craftsmanship and equipment. For instance this shot from Lake Eklutna shot on 4x5 Fuji Velvia begs for a large print. A small print won't show the universe of minutia in the ice. It took a long time to focus the camera for this and the technical details of the shot surpass anything I can achieve with today's digital cameras. It seems a waste to lose it all in a tiny print.

4x5 shot of Lake Eklutna Ice. Even in a scan from a cheap flatbed scanner you can see an incredible amount of detail.

We should also consider that a lot of traditional landscape photography is anchored in the 19th century and still suffers the influence of ideas about the sublime as described by Edmund Burke and friends. Nature is large, powerful, scary, and this is where much of its beauty comes from. John Ruskin describes it in Modern Painters:

In order to produce these peculiar impressions of sublimity on the human mind, certain degrees of this material largeness are absolutely necessary. No beauty of design in architecture, or of form in mountains, will entirely take the place of what may be called "brute largeness." That is to say, of the actual superiority in feet and inches, over the size of Humanity…

The large print reflects an aesthetic derived from the "brute largeness" of nature; nature overwhelms us and to bring this experience to the viewer the print should overwhelm us too. But it makes me wonder if perhaps the landscape printed at a more modest dimension might be more appropriate for our time. We have come to regard nature as fragile, easily disturbed, something you would hold in your hand like a small bird. We now attribute much of nature's beauty to its unity and completeness, not its overwhelming expanse and sublimity—it's not something to be conquered, an idea that seems reckless by today's standards, not heroic. An aesthetic based on a small print steps away from the 19th century idea of unlimited resources and manifest destiny and admits that, at least in the lower 48, no matter how wild the land seems, you are never more than 30 miles from a road.