At the suggestion of fellow photographer Lee Friedlander, Christenberry began photographing with a large-format camera in 1977. This simple change in equipment enabled subtle but significant shifts in his photographs. The larger camera not only created sharper, more detailed negatives that rendered color more vibrantly, but the optical mechanics also allowed Christenberry to give greater consideration to his compositional strategies and opened the way for experimentation with deeper picture planes that accentuated transitions between foreground, middle ground, and background, as seen in this work.