All images featured in our website gallery are available as fine-art photographic prints.

Please keep in mind that photographic prints use different dyes than color plates in books and magazines, and therefore may appear markedly different from such published reproductions. The artist chooses to match them as closely as possible to the original transparency, rather than to any published reproduction.

Prints are categorized as Unlimited, Limited, or Special Edition* (also Limited). Acid-free archival museum board matting and framing are priced separately from prints.

Crystal Archive LightJet Prints offer the ultimate fidelity in color, sharpness, and tonal range currently available on any photographic paper. We have introduced this revolutionary process for just 220 top selects out of hundreds of thousands of images by Galen and Barbara in our files. It has taken us four years to create these highly labor-intensive master images, and we do not plan to add more, except from outstanding new work. State-of-the-art image management and digital enlarging result in far more accurate renditions of what Galen or Barbara witnessed and recorded on film than any traditional optical enlargements. Our Mountain Light Gallery in Bishop features a telling display of transparencies for direct comparison with prints on the walls.

The most notable difference, compared to ordinary prints, is that LightJet prints no longer lose color and contrast with enlargement. Colors remain clean and saturated, like a projected slide, because digital enlarging uses the same numbers to control scanning lasers that expose photographic emulsion grain by grain, regardless of print size, instead of all at once, as in optical enlarging where prints get dull and flat with increased size. Thus a 50-inch print matches the intensity of a 5-inch print. Galen oversaw all creative decisions for each master image file during the many hours of image management in Mountain Light’s own “digital darkroom.” Every print, regardless of size, exactly reproduces his chosen aesthetic values when exposed by LightJet 5000 laser output using a special Apple ColorSync profile onto Fuji Crystal Archive photographic paper. The result is a true original photograph on a paper that could also be exposed in a traditional enlarger.

Galen deeply respected the sacred trust that nature photographers hold to reproduce no more than what was actually before their lens. He never added subject matter or colors not present at the scene, nor removed distractions, such as twigs or wires. He did correct objectionable film artifacts, such as scratches from improper handling by publishers, emulsion flaws, and film-based color crossover effects.

Independent tests suggest that Fuji Crystal Archive prints in normal display conditions will last 60 to 71 years before noticeable fade, which is more than four times longer than the 16 to 20 years of Kodak’s present papers or the Fujix prints made from our LightJet digital files that we offer as less expensive alternatives to Crystal Archive.

For more details, be sure to read Galen’s feature article for Outdoor Photographer, June 1999, in the Articles section of this website.

Though Crystal Archive LightJet photographs were Galen’s preferred medium, more economical Fujix Pictrography Prints with up to a 12 x 18-inch image area can be created from the same image files with virtually the same appearance, but a lesser, 16 to 20-year archival rating. The 12 x 18 maximum size is actually only one inch smaller than that of 16 x 20 LightJet prints, which have 1/2-inch borders for a final width of 19 inches. Both are normally mounted in the same size 22 x 28 archival mats. Like LightJet prints, these prints are created by a true silver halide photographic process involving exposure by color lasers.

We list our largest Fujix prints as 16 x 20, since photographic prints have traditionally been sold by paper size, rather than image area, and a 12 x 18 Fujix exactly matches the image area of our traditional Dye Transfer prints on 16 x 20 paper with a one-inch border on each side and a 12-inch width to match the 3 to 2 aspect ratio of the 35mm original.