Well today was the BIG Day.

And I do mean BIG.

The 24 foot wide DFW Skyline mural I created for Delta Air Lines was revealed today during the grand reopening of their Dallas Call Center.

Let me start by saying my wife and I were treated incredibly well by everyone we met.  And that was a lot of people.  Everyone was very solicitous, we got the $0.25 tour of the facility and were wowed by the world class massive airplane photographic murals on numerous expansive walls.  The building itself is spacious, light and bright, with a very nice feel to it.  I would think it to be a great place to work, based on the feel of the environment and friendliness of everyone we met.

As you come in the entry, you go down a long corridor to the central cantilever staircase (nice touch).  Along the left side of this corridor is my mural, 24 feet long in all its glory, beautifully illuminated.  This is the first thing you see when you come into the facility.

When we arrived both the large mural and canvas print were shrouded from prying eyes.  No one had seen either of them until the big reveal.  Especially not me.  I handed the digital file off to an art house in Atlanta last April and they took it from there.

The people at Delta were kind enough to include me in the big reveal.  A line of us grasped the bottom of the plastic shroud and pulled it off with the appropriate flourish.  There was an audible gasp from all the Delta employees as the mural was revealed.  It was truly an awe-inspiring moment for me, as this is the largest and most time-consuming creation of my career.  Being there and being included in the ceremony was an honor and a privilege.  I can’t even begin to count the number of people who wanted their photo taken with me in front of the mural, but I will tell you I was extremely flattered by the attention.

Some background on this mural:

Last March, while we were in Taiwan, I received the first inquiry from Jane Jewett at Delta regarding this mural.  She had seen the one I did for KTXD TV in Dallas.  That one was created in 2013 and is 208″ wide by 96″ High.  The one for Delta was to be 288″ wide by only 72″ high.  This meant I could not re-purpose the original.  It also meant I had to re-shoot a lot of Dallas to get the very high resolution images necessary to produce something this big and have it be crisp.

So…  Off I went late one afternoon to re-shoot Dallas.  I started with the Chase Tower from Klyde Warren Park and then worked my way over near the south side of Reunion Tower.  I wanted the view from this direction so I could include part of that gorgeous multi-tiered reflective building to the north of Reunion Tower.  Also, at sunset, you can see the actual texture and details of the tower.  But you can’t really get the effect of the lights.  So after sunset I headed across the Trinity River to the levee for purposes of capturing tight closeups of all the other Dallas skyline buildings I needed.  Each building was captured individually and hand-placed along with the existing Fort Worth components.  Everything had to be cut out and placed in the correct relationship to achieve the desired graphic art effect,.

Reunion tower alone was a good 3 hours of work as each individual light was hand-placed in the final image after the sky and background was removed.

A lot of processing is done to each and every element in preparation for the final assembly.

Total editing time of this image is around 20 hours, which is pretty much what I expected when I quoted the job in the first place, so I was happy with the result.

And there you have it.  The DFW Skyline.

So here are a few photos from today’s event.

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