This is a vertical panorama of a wooded scene in a Japanese stroll garden on Long Island. It was originally shot in infrared and then converted it to give the appearance of a sepia print.

I have a theory about the development of an image. I call it "The Ladder Theory." This is the idea that a picture can grow towards a final state over a long period of time. At each point along the way, the picture appears to be finished. Then, sometime later, the picture will look unfinished and needing more work. Perhaps a sepia tone, or perhaps the current version of the picture, which once looked okay, now looks a little flat.

I think that Picasso worked that way. For instance, if you look at what he did with etching and aquatints, you will see that he took the same plate and reworked it through numerous stages until he was finally happy with the image.

The idea of the Ladder Theory isn't that a picture travels through many stages, it's that each step is like the rung of a ladder, and you have to stop at each point along the way. At each point you thought the image was finished, but it let you know there was more work to be done.

Doing this is easy if you're doing your art on a computer, but it becomes complex and difficult if you're working with real media. With the computer, you're free to experiment in a limitless fashion. Before I posted this picture, I decided that it was too flat and needed to go one more step up the ladder.

It took some experimentation to get the look I was after. When you put this version next to the previous version, which I had thought finished six months ago, the new version is obviously better.

Is this the final version of this picture...?