Two hundred of commercial and fine art photographer Jon Ortner’s black-and-white large-format nature photos have been collected into a new book, “Visions of Paradise: American Wilderness” (Images Published Group). Whether photographing winding canyons or expansive dune fields across the United States, “Ortner possesses an extraordinary knack for transforming the elemental essence of nature into captivating abstractions,” writes Canadian street photographer Michael Ernest Sweet in the book’s forward.

Ortner explains that he uses digital photography for his commercial work and reserves film photography for his fine art books and gallery prints. For the images in “Visions of Paradise,” his eighth book, he used the Fujifilm GX617 panorama camera with four different Fujinon lenses, and the Pentax 67II medium format camera with 14 Pentax lenses. He used Kodak T-Max 100, 120mm black-and-white film because it has “the finest grain and most pleasing contrast of any black-and-white film I have ever used,” he says.