A couple weeks ago a very interesting link started floating around the internet. Nick Risinger, a 28 year old amateur photographer used six astronomical cameras to create a 360 degree panorama of the 60,000+ miles of the night sky from the Western USA to South Africa. Now don't expect me to explain how this worked exactly, but Risinger stitched together over 37,000 different photographs. I spent almost an hour gazing into the night sky at home one night, you could easily spend more time doing this as you can zoom in and navigate the entire 360 degree panorama. Here is a link to the high resolution/interactive photo. Now I think just simply sharing this amazing work of imagery would normally be enough, but after discussing it with some of my colleagues here at Unique, I would like to talk about it a little further. As someone who has been a "perfectionist" their entire life, I have always appreciated the higher quality images that come from using film. Although some super-expensive digital medium format backs are getting close, there is still nothing in the digital world that can produce as crisp and dynamic of an image as a large format 4x5 or 8x10 camera. Trust me I have looked at many of my 4x5/8x10 negative scans (from a flatbed, not even drum) and digital captures just can't touch them. However all this aside, what Nick Risinger did just couldn't possibly be done with film technology. I see a lot of plain jane/white-bread type digital photographs everyday and think how much better they could have been if shot on film, especially if you want to print them large. In this regard, I have a negative view of digital photography as I believe it (in some ways) has made people lazy and has made learning the fundamentals of photography harder. However when I see something innovative like this, I have to let go of the old traditionalist critic that resides in my head, and embrace the technology. The sky is the limit (bad pun, I'm sorry) for digital photography and I will keep posting creative and original uses of the technology here as I find them. I hope everyone has a good start to their week! -MZ