“The P 65+ is providing resolution that is exceeding some of the older 4×5 that we have”

Michael Roscoe

Getting a blend of creative photography with a true business context can be a difficult balance for any photographer to find. In addition the Sky Factory is a company that provides a product that genuinely helps comfort people when they can feel at their most vulnerable. The success of this company is based on sound principles.

Artist and entrepreneur Bill Witherspoon founded Sky Factory about six years ago. Its premise, put simply by the Company, is that they create ‘authentic illusions of nature’. They have a number of products in their range but the original and biggest seller is the Luminous SkyCeiling™. As the name suggests, the SkyCeiling is a virtual skylight that delivers more benefits than just its obvious aesthetic qualities. These suspended ceilings are made up of a number of 2×2ft translucent acrylic panels that feature backlit images of skies, clouds, and sometimes surrounding foliage. They have proved most popular in the Healthcare Industry where they are commonly installed in places such as radiology suites and over patient beds. “There is a convincing body of research that supports the use of nature images in healthcare settings for their stress relieving and healing benefits. People feel more relaxed, heal more quickly and use less pain medication when nature views or simulated nature scenes are available,” explains Company representative Mark Petrick.

Mark is one of the Sky Factory team that includes founder Bill Witherspoon, Radim Schreiber, Mark Novak, and John Barker, who photograph the sky images used in the SkyCeilings, and landscapes used in the Luminous Virtual Windows™ product for walls . He explains the company strategy for capturing imagery as “aesthetic principles that guide us to create very realistic images with great fidelity, color, and correct perspective so that when someone is under one of our SkyCeilings and they look up, it’s as authentic an experience of nature as possible”.

In the past, the Sky Factory images were captured using field view cameras with a medium format film back and then progressed to shooting 4×5” format film as their clients wanted larger SkyCeilings – some up to 90ft long – needing better quality images. This conventional approach, using film, had its problems as Mark recalls, “Shooting large format in the field and trying to generate the amount of images we needed wasn’t the most efficient route to take, so we were always watching digital and thinking when is digital going to hit a quality that is equal to 4×5”… then P 65+ came out”.

Reach for the Sky

The Sky Factory team tested the Phase One 645 camera, the P 65+ digital back and lens options and, within days of ordering the gear, tried out its capabilities on a two-week trip to Oregon. Excursions such as this one to update their image library happen at least twice a year, to enable the team to add hundreds of photographs of areas of natural beauty such as Steens Mountains in the American North West. Their approach to attaining images that they can utilize on the ceilings means they try to get the perspective appearing as normal as possible, so they typically use an 80mm lens or swap to a 45mm to get more coverage. “We try to create images that don’t look photographic – We avoid telltale signs of photographic distortion,” Mark clarifies and explains that they are experimenting with increasing depth of field by using multiple exposures to replicate an authentic viewing experience, “the eye is in focus wherever it’s looking, so it’s better if our images are in focus everywhere”.

This real life field-test to the desert and tall mountain ranges of Oregon reaped rich rewards in skyscapes and landscape images. One of the main difficulties when photographing the sky is trying to accurately capture and reproduce the shadow, highlight and wide tonal range, but Mark’s verdict is conclusive, “Our feeling is that the P 65+ is providing resolution that is exceeding some of the older 4×5 that we have, but the [12.5 f-stops] wider dynamic range surpasses film, and that is a huge benefit”.

The Sky Factory team also noted some other benefits of shooting digitally. “The kit is now very portable, so travelling to remote locales and other countries and shooting trees that aren’t North American is something we’re getting into.” Handling also gets the thumbs up, as it is not only smaller than a large format camera, “It’s weighted and balanced nicely. It’s a simple camera, which is another thing I love about it. It’s like shooting with an old manual camera even though you’ve got this amazing technology strapped to the back of it”.

Whilst on location, the team shoots directly to a CompactFlash card and downloads in the evening to a MacBook Pro laptop. Postproduction starts with the Capture One software where images are converted from RAW format, and finished off and blended together in Photoshop.

Real Reactions

The proof of success, once a SkyCeiling is installed, can be measured in a number of ways but the reaction can be startling in Mark’s experience, “It’s not unusual for people to walk into one of these spaces and ask, ‘How did you get a skylight in here?’ They simply don’t realize that it’s not a real skylight… it’s also common for people to say ‘Oh, are the clouds moving?’ even though they’re not, the realistic images trigger our memories of the sky’s natural changes”.

But the real benefit, particularly to a hospital patient, can work on a deeper subconscious level even after they recognize that it is not a real sky according to the Company’s research. “What we’re trying to do is create compelling illusions of nature. If the authenticity of the display tricks the mind and body then it promotes the same kinds of psychological and physiological reactions to the illusion as we’d have to the actual experience”. Mark states that the success of this depends on realism, so accurate colour, detail, and resolution of the sky image ceilings is vital, which is why they’ve invested in the Phase One system. Get these elements correct and the effects can be astonishing and produce a genuine ‘relaxation response’ where physiological measures such as blood pressure, heart and breathing rate purportedly improve, which is especially beneficial during stressful hospital procedures.

The importance of the Sky Factory image collection is a cornerstone of the Company’s competitive edge and future success. All the photographs are shot by the in-house team and are exclusively used by the Company. “It’s our intellectual property. We don’t license them, they’re just for us. This is another reason why we’re excited about using the Phase One because our competition isn’t going to do this. We know what their level of commitment is. Phase One is definitely a quality differentiator for us.”