Landscape mode

Ultra-high-resolution photographer Alexander Lindsay has made an art form of shooting some of the world's most dramatic landscapes to produce enormous yet pin-sharp prints. Richard Webber spends a day with him in search of the ultimate 'big landscape, small car' image

A tan Alexander Lindsay exhibition, you don't just walk around the room, you walk around the photographs. His prints go up to 15 metres wide, with a surface area more than two-thirds that of the Bayeux Tapestry. But unlike, say, giant-format billboard ads, Lindsay's prints are incredibly sharp-200 dots per inch at a minimum - which means you'll never see pixelation or degradation: what looks like a beautiful landscape from across the room still looks beautiful at the end of your nose. It's brain-bending stuff, widely known as gigapixel photography.

Lindsay explains his process: "Every camera has a sensor,  whether it's film or digital, and the size of the sensor dictates the quality of the picture. Taking a digital sensor and overlapping images in effect makes that sensor truly enormous, giving a much, much higher quality image. You can make it as big as you want. I use a high-spec Nikon 27-nothing you can't buy on the high street - but it's more about taking the pictures in a precise grid. You then stitch them all together in Photoshop." Fife-based Lindsay is now exclusively a photographic landscape artist whose typical prints are between one and eight metres wide and cost around £1000 to £6000.

But his 40-year career comprises a panoply of photography and film-making projects beyond the reach of civilisation, from the bottom of the ocean to the Atacama Desert and Sovietoccupied Afghanistan (see Q&A over the page). He half-jokes that Scotland on a rough day can be as challenging as anywhere, but we're hoping for clemency on a warm-ish October afternoon in Perthshire.

'Big landscape, small car' is a phrase uttered by Autocar snappers on more indulgent shoots, accompanied by a noble, faraway stare as they scour some pretty vista for a spot to place the car. But this time, we're going giga.