What would Ansel Adams have done?

Phil V said:
But not beyond the quality of 'digital'. :D

No one else mentioned format size. It's clear from the quote he was looking forward to the challenges and opportunities that the new technology would bring.
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ST4 said:
Phase one IQ250 :D He'd shoot with that if funds allowed...
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And like I said he'd probably be moving "across" but MF digital is only just catching up with (small) sheet film sizes, 8x10 still smokes it and there are much bigger sizes if you need them and Adams wasn't afraid to use them, even dragging a donkey with him to carry it.
 
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I think he would be delighted with the amount of control he would have in post processing and the repeatability in printing but not terribly impressed with the reduced dynamic range.


Steve.
 
Bearing in mind his work was largely based on getting the print to match his pre-conceived vision as much as possible, I suspect he'd have done whatever the hell he needed to achieve what he wanted to achieve without getting bogged down by the silly questions many photographers worry far too much about these days.
 
PMN said:
I suspect he'd have done whatever the hell he needed to achieve what he wanted to achieve without getting bogged down by the silly questions many photographers worry far too much about these days.
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No. He would switch from Nikon to Canon and back again every six months!


Steve.
 
Phil V said:
It's not just the process though, what would he have shot?

It's impossible to unravel history, if those images hadn't been shot 'back then' shooting them now isn't the automatic alternative. In fact, would the national parks even exist?
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Getting back to the more interesting question; I do wonder if he'd be a notable photographer these days. If we assume that the national parks movement carried on without him then a lot of what he shot would now have been "done to death" perhaps not with the same skill or passion but would it need to be. If the national parks never happened I think its fairly safe to assume they'd have been strip mined by now.
 
steveo_mcg said:
Getting back to the more interesting question; I do wonder if he'd be a notable photographer these days. If we assume that the national parks movement carried on without him then a lot of what he shot would now have been "done to death" perhaps not with the same skill or passion but would it need to be. If the national parks never happened I think its fairly safe to assume they'd have been strip mined by now.
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Good point. He was a pioneer. If he was a working landscape photographer now he'd be competing with countless thousands of others, visiting the same locations as they do, and attempting to earn a tiny slice of an ever-shrinking pie. He'd definitely be running workshops, and it would probably be the only way he could pay his bills. it's difficult to believe he wouldn't be using digital and working in colour, probably using one of the top Canons, Nikons, or Sonys. I've said elsewhere that today's landscape photographers are building on the foundations he laid. So had he not existed when he did he would be building on foundations that someone else laid.

As for his activities in the Sierra Club, we just don't know. Perhaps some of the National Parks he helped create would still have been created, perhaps not. He wasn't the only founding father of the conservation movement but at the time he must have been a powerful and influential figure.
 
steveo_mcg said:
Getting back to the more interesting question; I do wonder if he'd be a notable photographer these days. If we assume that the national parks movement carried on without him then a lot of what he shot would now have been "done to death" perhaps not with the same skill or passion but would it need to be. If the national parks never happened I think its fairly safe to assume they'd have been strip mined by now.
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I'd assume that the National Parks movement wasn't reliant on him, so they'd still exist.

His landscape work was a hobby, so it's still have happened. He shot commercial work for a living, and I guess he still would. But the thing he did that was reliant on him alone is the zone system. I'd like to think of him running workshops and a website dedicated to exposure and processing. Just what he did before, but in the digital age, with the benefits that brings.
 
Phil V said:
I'd assume that the National Parks movement wasn't reliant on him, so they'd still exist.

His landscape work was a hobby, so it's still have happened. He shot commercial work for a living, and I guess he still would. But the thing he did that was reliant on him alone is the zone system. I'd like to think of him running workshops and a website dedicated to exposure and processing. Just what he did before, but in the digital age, with the benefits that brings.
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Probably not quite true to say that it was a hobby. Apparently he was an absolute workaholic and he liked a pretty decent standard of living, so he did do a lot of commercial work . His biography contrasts his life with Edward Weston's - who was much more of a purist, a bit of a recluse, and lived the simple life.

It was his landscape work and his conservation activities which drove him onward. He was also a highly regarded figure in the art world of the time - not just the world of photography - and it is difficult to imagine that someone like him, with his interests, would have much standing in today's artistic climate.
 
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ST4 said:
One exp for sky, one for land. Why not?
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I was allways preached at to take a good agressive sky shot to merge with the image back in the dark room days... There was nowt wrong with that idealisme at the time. However, these days everyone thinks it's cheating where as I still think it's creating an overall image to present & if it look good..... then it works for me. (old school)
 
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jerry12953 said:
Following on from a couple of interesting discussions elsewhere on here, I've been wondering about this.

Had he been born fifty years later, and bearing in mind his mastery of film processing and printing, would Ansel Adams have welcomed and mastered digital processing? How far would he have gone down the manipulation route?

I'd be interested to hear thoughts on this. If this has been discussed elsewhere, are there any pointers to further reading?
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He wrote just before he died that he was very excited by the prospect of digital imaging, which was just in it's infancy when he sadly left us in 1984.

I think he would have embraced digital fully, yes. I can't imagine him making over-saturated chocolate box landscapes though, no.
 
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Pookeyhead said:
He wrote just before he died that he was very excited by the prospect of digital imaging, which was just in it's infancy when he sadly left us in 1984.

I think he would have embraced digital fully, yes. I can't imagine him making over-saturated chocolate box landscapes though, no.
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In one of my earlier posts I wondered aloud if his method of processing and printing his B&W's was the equivalent to todays " over-saturated chocolate box landscapes". Do you have a view on that?
 
jerry12953 said:
In one of my earlier posts I wondered aloud if his method of processing and printing his B&W's was the equivalent to todays " over-saturated chocolate box landscapes". Do you have a view on that?
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I know you weren't directing that at me but still...

Adams' processing was driven purely by his own vision. When he shot an image he generally already knew how he wanted the print to look so he'd work in the darkroom printing multiple times until the print looked the way he envisioned it. Many people these days don't process a lot of landscape shots for those reasons, they overcook them with HDR and crank the saturation up not for artistic reasons but because it's the 'trendy' thing to do. Adams was driven by a need to express what he felt at the time, many modern landscapes have no emotional content whatsoever. They're completely different situations driven by fundamentally different motives.
 
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Even if you're a digital only photographer, Ansel Adams' books, The Camera, The Negative and The Print are worth reading - Especially The Negative, to get an understanding of how his mind worked.

The first chapter of each of the books deals with visualisation of the image. As Paul says, he knew how he wanted the image to look and visualised it in his mind before selecting which camera/lens to use, which film to use, how to develop the film, how to expose the paper and even how to develop the paper.

He wasn't infallible and would often try various things at the print stage, of which there are examples in the book. Obviously experimentation at the print stage is easy as you can have several attempts. You only get one go with a sheet of film and developer.

I think these same visualisation techniques can be used with digital. Think about how you want the image to look before you start adjusting it then see how close you can get to your visualisation rather than adopting a 'lets see what this does' approach.


Steve.
 
PMN said:
I know you weren't directing that at me but still...

Adams' processing was driven purely by his own vision. When he shot an image he generally already knew how he wanted the print to look so he'd work in the darkroom printing multiple times until the print looked the way he envisioned it. Many people these days don't process a lot of landscape shots for those reasons, they overcook them with HDR and crank the saturation up not for artistic reasons but because it's the 'trendy' thing to do. Adams was driven by a need to express what he felt at the time, many modern landscapes have no emotional content whatsoever. They're completely different situations driven by fundamentally different motives.
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I suppose that today's landscape photographers have a choice of styles to try to emulate - magazines/books/ the modern masters. Adams was more or less out there on his own, making it up as he went along. So to that extent I'm sure you're right. But I do have a problem with the idea that landscape images are representative of the emotions that the photographer feels/felt. What emotions were they and when were they felt? At the time of taking? In the darkroom/at the PC? I know Adams said that this was the case, but what did he mean? One of the problems of landscape photography (and photography generally) for me is that it's very difficult, if not impossible, to express anything but a very limited range of emotions in one's work. And I don't see how it could have been any easier in Adams' time than it is now.
 
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jerry12953 said:
I suppose that today's landscape photographers have a choice of styles to try to emulate - magazines/books/ the modern masters. Adams was more or less out there on his own, making it up as he went along. So to that extent I'm sure you're right. But I do have a problem with the idea that landscape images are representative of the emotions that the photographer feels/felt. What emotions were they and when were they felt? At the time of taking? In the darkroom/at the PC? I know Adams said that this was the case, but what did he mean? One of the problems of landscape photography (and photography generally) for me is that it's very difficult, if not impossible, to express anything but a very limited range of emotions in one's work. And I don't see how it could have been any easier in Adams' time than it is now.
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I don't really think it's important when in the process he felt whatever emotions he had, I don't even think it's always important to know what those emotions were because to me it's more often about how a piece of art makes you feel rather than how it made the artist feel, that's why art is such a personal thing. I'm not a believer art has to have some profound and obvious message; there's only one thing I want from any piece of art be it a poem, painting, photo, piece of music or anything else, and that's purely that I want it to make me feel something. I'm not a kid in some school art class so I don't feel the need to explain or justify (or even analyse) those emotions and I don't always even know what a piece of art is saying, but I don't think you always need to. Some art has an instant profound effect on me (ranging from an immediate feeling of elation to an extreme sense of sadness), some opens my mind to think more about certain things; I don't even know what I feel from some art but it does something to grab my attention and captivate me. Art that typically has such an effect on me has strong emotional and personal content and for that to be the case it has to be fairly unique, i.e. not a carbon copy of what the majority of other people are doing. The vast majority of commercial music these days is extremely formulaic and really rather dull; nothing really stands out because the majority of producers are working to a very similar 'radio-friendly' formula in the hope of getting onto playlists - the more that happens the less personal the music becomes and the less meaning it has. Photography is essentially the same, that perfectly technically correct rule-of-thirds landscape composition with overcooked HDR style and the saturation cranked up has become the popular thing that the majority of people think gets views, so that's what they do. It's less to do with taking a photo for your own reasons and more driven by working to someone else's formula - a perfect example of work I feel absolutely nothing from when I view it. You summed up my problem with most landscape photography in your first sentence of that reply - landscape photographers have a choice of styles to try emulate. As long as you're trying to make your work look like someone else's you don't stand a chance in hell of producing anything that's personal to you with your own emotional content.
 
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Yes, I get that; if all we do is try to emulate someone else's style then we're unlikely to produce anything original.

But there's still the problem of emotional content which you brought up. How did Ansel Adams do it, when so many photographers these days just don't or can't. I would actually argue that while he thought he was imbuing his images with emotion (and said so) I don't see in what way his work is different to that produced by many of todays landscape photographers.
 
jerry12953 said:
Yes, I get that; if all we do is try to emulate someone else's style then we're unlikely to produce anything original.

But there's still the problem of emotional content which you brought up. How did Ansel Adams do it, when so many photographers these days just don't or can't. I would actually argue that while he thought he was imbuing his images with emotion (and said so) I don't see in what way his work is different to that produced by many of todays landscape photographers.
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You've answered your own question, most people these days want their work to look like someone else's rather than their own.
 
PMN said:
The vast majority of commercial music these days is extremely formulaic and really rather dull; nothing really stands out because the majority of producers are working to a very similar 'radio-friendly' formula in the hope of getting onto playlists
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Make sure it's run through a BBE Sonic Maximiser. HDR for audio!


Steve.
 
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The only difference I see in todays world rather than Adams' is accessibility and volume. If he took the same shots today and produced his work as he did on film or on digital, nobody would take the blindest bit of notice. Why? Because there are millions of landscape shots out there, of Yosemite and everywhere else, that are as good or better technically and just as good if not better to look at.

What he did was have access to good equipment of the time and a viewing public that hadn't seen anything like it before. Oh and a great degree of skill of course.

This constant sneering at over saturated and hdr scapes is puzzling. Everyone has to learn somewhere. You have to overcook it in order to understand what isnt overcooked. There are equally millions of brilliant landscapes out there, gorgeous and wonderfully crafted by really good photographers. Film and digital. Manipulated heavily and not. The difference now is that you are just one of millions not one in a few as Adams was at the time. He was a pioneer and rightly heralded as such but it was the uniqueness that first grabbed attention.

A modern day landscape is hard to make unique and even if you manage that then try getting it seen above the billions of other images available. Adams didnt have that problem (but had others no doubt).

I don't find anything special about Adams' images other than historical. Side by side with many top landscapers today they aren't anything that special. I get it, I really do but the wonder and appreciation comes from the historical context surely. I don't hate them but they equally don't inspire me.

Don't get me started on acceptance of manipulation and where the line is drawn. To me, as long as everyone is honest i really and truly don't care (OK except science and journalism). Its the final image that counts. Photoshop skills (good ones) are harder to learn than most camera skills so I happily admire them both. Emotion is a difficult one. And the hardest thing of all to put into a photograph at any stage, pre or post. It's why those who can are very good photographers and I admire them greatly. Brilliantly photoshopped images still often contain no emotion just as easily as a so called SOOC one. It's why landscapes are often just seen as eye candy. Nice to look at initially but don't fix a non photographers eyes for long.

Give me a poorly shot emotional photograph over a beautifully exposed one lacking any feeling anytime.

Not all images have to contain emotion. There are millions of reasons why they might not but captivating and memorable ones generally do. Recognising it and working with it is the hardest thing to achieve. I learned all i wanted to about camera skills years ago, I still am very much at the 'L' plate stage regarding adding the elusive 'emotion' to my images and I've been trying for over a decade. However, its what keeps me taking photographs. Sure, I love being in the great outdoors shooting pretty landscapes for the sake of it, its my equivalent to fishing, but i pretty much already know (barring a handful) that these shots are never going to inspire me or anyone else...

Music is always an interesting analogy. There has in my lifetime always been a 'commercially' acceptable sound that is in fashion at any one time. Radio 1 has never been the place to hear different and challenging styles of music. It still isn't. However, these days there is so much material out there the difficulty is finding it but there are places to find 'new' music as there always has been.
 
Rich_Ellis said:
I still am very much at the 'L' plate stage regarding adding the elusive 'emotion' to my images and I've been trying for over a decade..
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Stop trying so hard. :) You shouldn't be trying to put emotion into your images, it should happen naturally. This is why Pookeyhead's point of shooting subjects that mean something to you is so significant - if your subject has emotional value to you then your images will naturally encompass those feelings, often without you even realising it. Emotional content isn't something you learn like a new editing trick, it's something that's in you as an individual person and you just need to find a way of letting it come out on it's own.

Rich_Ellis said:
Music is always an interesting analogy. There has in my lifetime always been a 'commercially' acceptable sound that is in fashion at any one time. Radio 1 has never been the place to hear different and challenging styles of music. It still isn't. However, these days there is so much material out there the difficulty is finding it but there are places to find 'new' music as there always has been.
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My professional background is in music (and has been for almost 20 years) so it's the most obvious analogy I can come up with. Spotify's Radio feature is a good one for finding new music, it throws up all sorts of interesting things. Good new music is fairly easy to find, you just have to stay away from the usual commercial outlets - a bit like avoiding Flickr and 500px if you want to find new and inspiring photography... :)
 
PMN said:
Stop trying so hard. :) You shouldn't be trying to put emotion into your images, it should happen naturally. This is why Pookeyhead's point of shooting subjects that mean something to you is so significant - if your subject has emotional value to you then your images will naturally encompass those feelings, often without you even realising it. Emotional content isn't something you learn like a new editing trick, it's something that's in you as an individual person and you just need to find a way of letting it come out on it's own.



My professional background is in music (and has been for almost 20 years) so it's the most obvious analogy I can come up with. Spotify's Radio feature is a good one for finding new music, it throws up all sorts of interesting things. Good new music is fairly easy to find, you just have to stay away from the usual commercial outlets - a bit like avoiding Flickr and 500px if you want to find new and inspiring photography... :)
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I wasn't asking for help, just making a point. I've been in the photography industry for some years and trust me, its not as easy as you make it sound. I disagree that to merely shoot something you care about will make it emotional, in fact its total rubbish. If that was the case then 90% of flickr images would be emotionally charged and they simply arent. Every picture anyone took of their children would be emotional and that isnt true as we can see from these forums. Creating emotion is a combination of natural skill and development. Development of an individual enabling them to create well what they clearly see and feel. It's why artists of any genre practice, study, grow and make errors and re-do.

I also never suggested emotion was an editing trick, quite the opposite actually.

Yes spotify is a good place amongst many others, however, I was again making a point about commercial playlists and its always been the same, its nothing new. In all forms of art you have to make a degree of effort to discover new and interesting outlets. Sorry if i wasn't very clear :)
 
Rich_Ellis said:
I wasn't asking for help, just making a point. I've been in the photography industry for some years and trust me, its not as easy as you make it sound. I disagree that to merely shoot something you care about will make it emotional, in fact its total rubbish. If that was the case then 90% of flickr images would be emotionally charged and they simply arent. Every picture anyone took of their children would be emotional and that isnt true as we can see from these forums. Creating emotion is a combination of natural skill and development. Development of an individual enabling them to create well what they clearly see and feel. It's why artists of any genre practice, study, grow and make errors and re-do.
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Where did I say it was easy? You must have dreamed that bit because I certainly didn't say it was easy. I'm talking about the fundamental principles of the matter and I stand absolutely 100% behind what I said.
 
PMN said:
Where did I say it was easy? You must have dreamed that bit because I certainly didn't say it was easy. I'm talking about the fundamental principles of the matter and I stand absolutely 100% behind what I said.
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Stand away! My bad. You seemed to be suggesting you should just take pics of things you care about and it happens naturally. In fact you opened with "youre trying too hard"! Anyway, doesn't matter really!
 
Rich_Ellis said:
Stand away! My bad. You seemed to be suggesting you should just take pics of things you care about and it happens naturally. In fact you opened with "youre trying too hard"! Anyway, doesn't matter really!
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If you're setting out to purposely try inject your images with emotion as you said you are then yes, I think you're trying too hard.
 
PMN said:
I don't really think it's important when in the process he felt whatever emotions he had, I don't even think it's always important to know what those emotions were because to me it's more often about how a piece of art makes you feel rather than how it made the artist feel, that's why art is such a personal thing. I'm not a believer art has to have some profound and obvious message; there's only one thing I want from any piece of art be it a poem, painting, photo, piece of music or anything else, and that's purely that I want it to make me feel something. I'm not a kid in some school art class so I don't feel the need to explain or justify (or even analyse) those emotions and I don't always even know what a piece of art is saying, but I don't think you always need to. Some art has an instant profound effect on me (ranging from an immediate feeling of elation to an extreme sense of sadness), some opens my mind to think more about certain things; I don't even know what I feel from some art but it does something to grab my attention and captivate me. Art that typically has such an effect on me has strong emotional and personal content and for that to be the case it has to be fairly unique, i.e. not a carbon copy of what the majority of other people are doing. The vast majority of commercial music these days is extremely formulaic and really rather dull; nothing really stands out because the majority of producers are working to a very similar 'radio-friendly' formula in the hope of getting onto playlists - the more that happens the less personal the music becomes and the less meaning it has. Photography is essentially the same, that perfectly technically correct rule-of-thirds landscape composition with overcooked HDR style and the saturation cranked up has become the popular thing that the majority of people think gets views, so that's what they do. It's less to do with taking a photo for your own reasons and more driven by working to someone else's formula - a perfect example of work I feel absolutely nothing from when I view it. You summed up my problem with most landscape photography in your first sentence of that reply - landscape photographers have a choice of styles to try emulate. As long as you're trying to make your work look like someone else's you don't stand a chance in hell of producing anything that's personal to you with your own emotional content.
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Look at the top 20 single charts and you have artists ranging from Justin Bieber to Adele to Ed Sheeran to Coldplay to One Direction to Drake. You aren't going to get Coldplay and One Direction mixed up or think Adele sounds a bit too much like Justin Bieber. Just like photography (and even landscape photography), music is not exactly homogeneous.

To me a picture of a vista could make me sentimental or nostalgic or lift your spirits or intrigue me enough to go there. I don't see anything wrong with being influenced by a lot of the greats, they in turn would have been influenced by painters and sculptors and so on and so on. The HDR fad does grate when done badly, but it can be done well if used subtly and sparingly like all things. I'd judge it case by case.
 
Of course, but even Adele and Coldplay are very much on the commercial side. You seem to have misunderstood my point, of course there's nothing at all wrong with having influences; how can you develop in what you do unless you're aware of what others are doing? That's a very different situation to outright trying to emulate someone else though.
 
PMN said:
Of course, but even Adele and Coldplay are very much on the commercial side. You seem to have misunderstood my point, of course there's nothing at all wrong with having influences; how can you develop in what you do unless you're aware of what others are doing? That's a very different situation to outright trying to emulate someone else though.
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But how can you say someone is definitely copying as opposed to being strongly influenced either consciously or subconsciously? Even then what if by copying they manage to build confidence to innovate, surely it has been worth it? I don't really like being hamstrung creatively by self imposed rules about copying or don't use this function of a program or camera.
 
Laudrup said:
But how can you say someone is definitely copying as opposed to being strongly influenced either consciously or subconsciously? Even then what if by copying they manage to build confidence to innovate, surely it has been worth it? I don't really like being hamstrung creatively by self imposed rules about copying or don't use this function of a program or camera.
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I can't, but what I'm addressing is the point of emulating others rather than being influenced by someone and still doing things in your own way. I'm a huge fan of Steve McCurry and his approach (among others) has definitely influenced me in how I approach things, but from his work so many others have done things like going to Rajastan to 'document' the Rabari shepherds and guess what? Yup, most of their images just look like Steve McCurry's. You can hardly tell them apart in some cases. If people want to go shoot in such a way then fine but I can't say I see the point in going out specifically to copy someone else's work. There's nothing at all personal about that, and that lack of personal input really shows in the final images.

In your last line you're essentially saying the same as I am, even though it might not be obvious. Of course you don't want to have rules imposed on you which is why you should shoot for yourself, for your own reasons, and doing what you love rather than the goal being to try make your work look like other people's.
 
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PMN said:
If you're setting out to purposely try inject your images with emotion as you said you are then yes, I think you're trying too hard.
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well, thanks for your input, but i'll respectfully ignore it.
 
PMN said:
Do whatever you want, it makes absolutely no difference to me. If you have such a dislike of people commenting on what you post though you may wish to consider not posting at all.
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Haha, i will thanks and don't care a jot if it does or doesn't bother you tbh. I have no dislike whatsoever of comments made but people who come on giving bad advice to something not requested requires a response to ensure others didn't misunderstand my post as you did. Maybe you shouldn't be offering advice on something you seem to have no idea about and that wasn't asked for?

You gave a strong impression emotion was simple to achieve in an image by just shooting what interests you and letting it happen, then when called out on it, said you never said it was simple! You know nothing of me, my subjects, my photography and yet think I'm trying too hard cos I said I was learning and am not always satisfied with the results. Maybe you're psychic as well as giving advice that flies in the face of most recognised artistic endeavour.
 
Rich_Ellis said:
Haha, i will thanks and don't care a jot if it does or doesn't bother you tbh. I have no dislike whatsoever of comments made but people who come on giving bad advice to something not requested requires a response to ensure others didn't misunderstand my post as you did. Maybe you shouldn't be offering advice on something you seem to have no idea about and that wasn't asked for?

You gave a strong impression emotion was simple to achieve in an image by just shooting what interests you and letting it happen, then when called out on it, said you never said it was simple! You know nothing of me, my subjects, my photography and yet think I'm trying too hard cos I said I was learning and am not always satisfied with the results. Maybe you're psychic as well as giving advice that flies in the face of most recognised artistic endeavour.
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Now you're just ranting childish nonsense. I can only respond to what you write, if you do insist on posting maybe you should be more thoughtful in doing so. Grow up.
 
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