Making The Switch From Painting To Photography

I started my career in 1987 as an editorial illustrator. At that time, I used a camera to take reference images for my illustrations. In 2004, after I started showing my plein air landscape paintings in galleries, I bought a Nikon D70 to take file photos of my paintings. At the time I hadn’t considered using the camera for anything else, but then I had an idea for a painting that required a camera to get reference. Normally I painted from life, but in this case, that would involve a model standing on a mountaintop for a couple of days. It was impractical, so I pulled out my D70, took about 50 reference shots, assembled them into a single image, and made the painting from those. After making it though, I kept thinking it could have been a photograph instead—but I didn’t have the right equipment to do it right (Figures 1-2).
Figure 1 Call to Prayer reference image (montage)
 
Figure 2 Call to Prayer, Acrylic on paper 24" x 60" 2005
Since then I decided to get serious about photogra...