When photographer Clifford Ross first saw Colorado's Mt. Sopris, he was so taken with the beauty of the mammoth formation that he jumped on the roof of his brother-in-law's car - denting it - to photograph the landscape.

But Ross found that his 35mm photos didn't get anyone else excited. They simply didn't capture enough detail to convey the majesty of the white-capped mountain surrounded by grassy fields.

So he decided to make a camera that could create an image as awe-inspiring as the vista before him. The result was R1, a 110-pound, 6-foot film camera that produces what experts say are some of the highest-resolution landscape photographs ever made.

"Mountain I," a 5-foot-by-10-foot color photograph captured by that camera, is on display at the Sonnabend Gallery in New York through July 30.

Ross, 51, wanted to share a near-replica of reality, without any of the blurring visible in most large prints. "You can choose to go up to the picture and experience it intimately with a sense of unbroken reality," he says.

Details of the mountain's snowcapped peak - 7 miles from the camera - are in sharp focus, as are individual blades of grass only 30 meters away. When sections of the image are magnified nearly four times, other details are clearly visible: the shingles on a barn 1,200 meters from the camera, a red bird in the grass 45 meters away.

A lower-resolution image captured on everyday 35mm film would break down when displayed at the size of "Mountain I." Viewers would see a fuzzy, fractured image - and Ross' miniature red bird would likely not be visible at all.

"You have to ask the question, `What's the point of painting a scene like this when you can reproduce it with no loss of resolution?'" says Conor Foy, a 36-year-old painter. "The resolution of this seems to be more than anything I've seen before."

Ross acknowledges that he has very little technical background. "I'm not a research scientist and I'm not a designer of photographic mechanisms," the first-time inventor says. "I'm doing this because I want to make a piece of art."