Thursday, April 21, 2011

WCI scans for John Muir Book

When Houghton Mifflin Harcourt wanted to celebrate the 100th anniversary of John Muir’s seminal work My First Summer in the Sierra with an illustrated edition, they turned to Scot Miller, with whom they’d also created illustrated editions of Thoreau’s Walden and Cape Cod.  When Miller wanted to turn his gorgeous 6x7 chromes into digital files he turned to West Coast Imaging, who scanned over 70 pieces of film for the book.
Miller says “I experimented with doing my own scanning several years ago but quickly came to the conclusion that it took a lot of time, my results were inconsistent and it frustrated the heck out of me! For me, WCI is the only way to go and they have been doing my scans exclusively for over ten years now.”
“My experience has been that Jeff Grandy will capture every ounce of detail in a given image, (which) gives me the greatest flexibility as an artist when it comes to preparing images for printing. I have made display prints as large as six feet by seven feet from my 6x7cm transparencies, with great result. Without scans of the absolute best quality, this would not be possible.”
West Coast Imaging’s owner Rich Seiling found the project equally rewarding. “Book projects give us a chance to help artists take the same fine art quality they see in their prints onto the printed page. When you think of the number of people who will see a book we’ve worked on compared to the number of people who will see a fine art print, it’s astounding to consider, and very rewarding to know they are seeing the artist’s work reproduced as beautifully as possible.”
Learn more about the book at myfirstsummerinthesierra.com
Scot Miller’s website: suntomoon.com