Kirt Kempter is a geologist and educator living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His primary field study areas include the Jemez Mountains of northern New Mexico, Copper Canyon, Mexico, and Rincon de la Vieja volcano in northwestern Costa Rica. Kirt also leads educational tours for the Smithsonian Institution, including Iceland, Antarctica, and numerous exotic sites in between.
A lifetime of working and teaching outdoors has its merits (e.g. the opportunity to create photomosaic images of his favorite vistas) and pitfalls (knee surgery, premature wrinkled skin, and a deep cache of near-disaster stories). Many great field experiences have been shared with colleagues (Shari Kelley, Linda Fluk, Eric Swanson, Charles Kerans) and canine assistants (Dixie, Shadow, Natasha, and Austin).
Kirt creates these photomosaics by taking 7-10 overlapping pictures in the field with a digital camera. These images are then merged using Photoshop (by "hand" not using a stitching program), eventually yielding a high-resolution panoramic image (typically ~150 megabytes) that can be printed up to 2 feet by 8 feet across.
