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Would Ansel Adams Have Gone Digital?
Roland Piquepaille writes "After viewing photographs by Christopher Burkett, which are not digitally manipulated, Peter Lewis wondered what place have digital cameras and image manipulations in the art of photography. And a question hit his mind. If Ansel Adams, one of the most famous photographers of the 20th century, was still alive, would have he gone digital? Lewis talked at great length with Richard LoPinto, vice president for SLR camera systems at Nikon Inc. to find an answer. And guess what? LoPinto thinks Ansel Adams would have loved digital cameras. The article also discusses digital camera resolution and the future for film camera sales. This overview contains more details and a small photograph by Christopher Burkett."
Andy Warhol. He was all about the manipulation. Wonder where he would have been had he lived long enough to get past the Amiga technology.
Else he wouldn't have gotten "Sony Digital Camera Presents The Ansel Adams Show"
Ansel Adams was above all a environmentalist, probally more so than a photographer. Do you know the kind of chemicals needed to make a roll of film into a negitive? Just the enviromental savings from the lack of processing would have given him a reason to use digital.
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
My uncle is older, and got fascinated with digital technology once it hit his radar screen (he isn't a professional photographer). He once remarked that "Ansel would have LOVED this stuff...". I'm not a photographer, so I didn't get him to elaborate, but this probably backs up the author's assertion (at least anecdotaly).
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
...on his photos? He would probably use any technology that aided in delivering his vision.
I'm sure it will all wind up being digital, but there will be those die-hard people that will never change. (Like Charlie Chaplan refused to use films with sound, and didn't think it was an appropriate art form.) However, the nature of a print totally changes. It's a big deal to have an original print of a photo, one that's done from the negative. How is this going to effect the monetary value of the photos? For the record, I didn't RTFA. It might be answered in the article. (At least I'm honest.)
Ansel Adams used extensive post-processing--or the equivalent back then--by manipulating the negatives in the dark room. Would there have been much difference between him dodging and burning in there versus the digital Photoshop...? Would've made his life easier, and the results more accurate to his vision. This post-processing gave many of his photographs their characteristically "unnatural" contrast.
LOL How did the parent get modded informative?
...at least for downloading porn.
My father was a complete camera nut; he had a couple of Nikon FX (?) camera backs, and about a hundred different lenses.
Everything from super-wide-angle to "count nosehairs from 1km away"
It'd be really cool to have a digital camera that could make use of all these standardized (?) lenses.
Anybody got a source?
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
"Would Ansel Adams Have Gone Digital?"
Of course not. He didn't even go color.
Ansel Adams was all about the integrity and subtlety of the medium. In his day, he railed against the use of resin-coated photographic papers (which he referred to as "plastic papers"), because they didn't produce an image with the same purity and subtlety as one printed on fibre based paper (as any photographer can tell you).
Everyone has seen Adams coffee table books, but one has only to stand in front of an actual Adams print to see that there is a quality to his prints that cannot be reproduced by even the highest quality methods of reproduction. Even if you're jaded by overexposure to Adams books and calendars (as I am), it is breathtaking to see his work in person.
Richard LoPinto is trying to sell digital SLRs for Nikon. Frankly, I think it is a disrespect for him to speculate that Adams would have anything to do with a digital camera, or any digital process.
To ask this question now makes people say "oh, interesting... I wonder!" ... In five years, when they're all using fuel cells, capturing 10+MP storing tens of gigabytes of data, and the size of your pinky, this will be the most useless question ever. OF COURSE HE WOULD!
...it would only be using RAW images so he could twiddle with every pixel the way he'd want to, not the dumbed down way the camera would do it. Is there such a thing as an 8x10 digital back for a view camera?
Am I the only one who mis-read this title after answering the beer poll? lol. Even though I know it's Samuel Adams, that's the first thing that popped into my head. Beer on the brain for Friday I guess....
--
For great deals on electronics and computer equipment visit Retail Retreat
I think he would have gone digital.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
If you ever look into the three books that Ansel wrote, "The Camera", "The Negative", and "The Print", you can see how Ansel was a scientist. Just take a look in the backs of those books at all of the charts and graphs he has for different elements of the photographic process. He tested everything and knew more about how the film, camera, developer, and paper would react with each other, then almost anyone. Kodak would even give him new film to test out and report back on the characteristics of said film. He also came up with the zone system, which is a scientific way of going from what you want your photo to look like to actually making it look that way.
I think Ansel would have loved to test out the digital cameras and make observations on how the digital camera matched up with film cameras in different situations.
For some unknown reason, I have the names of "Ansel Adams" and "Robert Mapplethorpe" mixed up in my head. I was braced for something a bit different when I clicked...
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
He also would have kept his film cameras.
A 10-megapixel image is nice and all, but Adams used everything up to 8x10 cameras, and there's nothing like that kind of resolution even in the planning stages for digital. He certainly would have used digitals for his "small" works.
For big landscapes? no.
For example, a 4x5 using Velvia color film is in the 200 megapixel range, and the 8x10 would be closer to the gigapixel category using 25 ASA black and white...
Of course Ansel Adams would have gone digital. He did a tremendous amount of raw image manipulation in the darkroom; a large fraction of the "Zone System" is darkroom work. Digital imaging would have facilitated this work greatly.
"At great length?"
And while waiting for the perfect shot, he'd enjoy an cool, refreshing Coca-Cola(tm)!
Give me a break, people. This was a puff piece.
Anybody who has ever gone beyond darkroom 101 knows that the best photographers do some of their best work with subtle manipulations in the dark room. Adams' zone system is all about remapping the intensities in the original scene onto a pleasing span of whites to blacks in the print. Adams himself said that "Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships." Digital cameras and image manipulation programs only pickup where the relatively crude processes in the darkroom leave off.
Anyone who claims that photography is about objectively and accurately portraying the real scene knows very little about the nonlinear properties of human vision, film, and image reproduction systems and they know even less about art.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Ansel spent countless hours in the darkroom to "manipulate" his pictures. THat included choosing print paper type, exposure time, dodging (making an area lighter or darker) and the list goes on and on. If he had had a digital camera to match the resolution of his film camera, he would probably have been overjoyed. However, it seems that neither Canon or Kodak with their 13 and 15 megapixel cameras have come close to the resolution of the large negative cameras, so Ansel would probably still be using film!
Any photographer worth their salt would use digital... for the purposes that digital is good at. It has some impressive advantages over film, but also some areas where it needs to catch up ie film has a greater resolution than digital ever will and still there's no digital camera that can record clear images over ISO800
It is but one tool of many
The D100, D2H, and D1X are all currently available, very expensive, and range between 4-6.2 megapixels. You just have to manually focus with the old lenses (obviously), and I'm not absolutely certain, but I believe that the metering may not work on the oldest lenses without them being stopped down.
He manipultaed his images in the print quite a bit. He would have gone digital.
No longer can we regard a photograph as a unique freezing of a moment in time. We can no longer regard a photograph in the same way. We can never be certain that was is offered as a photograph depicts any actual event. It may or may not.
There are 22 megapixel backs for some view cameras. Which gives you about the same resolution (20 MP) as a digital medium-format back would, and about 1/9 of the resolution of normal 4x5 film.
In other news, Generalissimo Franco is still dead.
A quote from a recent PBS documentary:
...I don't know, half or forty percent of the creative process occurred in the darkroom...."
"He manipulated the work tremendously in the darkroom. He always said that the negative is the equivalent of the composer's score and the print is the equivalent of the conductor's performance, and the same piece of Mozart is conducted differently, performed differently, by different orchestras, different conductors, and Ansel performed his own negatives differently.
I could only imagine what Ansel Adams could do with Photoshop!
http://www.kubuntu.org/
The guy was willing to lug around a heavy large format camera and all of the required equipment to get the best image possible.
Do you think he'd be willing to give that up for a digital camera that is just now approaching medium/large format quality?
I think, assuming that he based the decision on resolution alone, he'd wait until digital unquestionably surpasses film.
get nemulator
Ansel Adams made fairly massive exposure changes in the darkroom. His prints were sometimes called "interpretations" because he played significantly with the development through print exposure time, dodging, and burning to get the look he wanted. He might have found Photoshop a much more powerful tool for this. That wouldn't have changed his zone exposure system, since the zone evaluations are independant of the tools used to make the changes required by his zone system.
That said, he was very fussy about quality. He was a part of the f64 club I believe, who believed in using very small apertures to get extremely good sharpness throughout. Current digital cameras, and in fact current film-based 35mm SLRs, don't go down to this aperture. This might change with digital backs being made available to some of the Hasselblad medium format cameras, so maybe he would have gone for a Hasselblad with a digital back.
And apart from basic camera abilities in controlling DOF, shutter speed, dynamic range etc it really isn't about the technology for photographers like Ansel Adams. The can "spot a picture" and determine the light needed to catch it at the right moment, the best framing etc. That is what separates the brilliant photographers from the mediocre.
Also I don't understand the adversity to "digital manipulation". If it is an artwork anyway who cares. Monet's or Van Gogh's paintings were not exactly true to nature either were they. Unless you are talking about documentary photos and photojournalistic photos digital enhancements is just a new exciting way to express what you wanted to express.
---- I really gotta come up with a cool sig...
wait, so a guy at nikkon (camera company - wanting to push digital cameras) is puting words in the mouth of a dead photographer in order to sell cameras? Is it just me, or does this sound fishy I wish I could underself my stand.
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Although, he would love the post processing ability of photoshop to manipulate faint details in a image, I think he would have been very unhappy about the limited dynamic range of digital.
I think he would have still used film for the contrast control not present in digital. Once digital cameras are developed with better contrast control he would begin to use them.
The Economics of Website Security
...would use organically-colored sand paintings instead of photographs.
He didn't manipulate his photos digitally, true. However, this statement is made apparantly to refute the idea that he manipulated the contrast, sharpness, brightness, etc, of his images -- which he does do.
I quote: "When I work with Cibachrome, I often utilize unique masking and printing techniques to adjust the contrast, sharpness, brightness levels, and relative weight of tones and colors."
His photos are great regardless of whether the subject actually looked like it does in the photo.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Analog cameras use batteries; and a good chunk of the spent energy is in the flash system, which both utilize. Additionally, my Canon Powershot G2 came with a rechargable battery that I've been using for 2 years now (close to 2000 pictures taken).
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
I have no idea if Ansel Adams would have used digital, but I wouldn't go asking an officer of a camera manufacturer if Adams would have bought new equipment if I wanted an objective opinion. (Disclaimer: I didn't RTFA)
Ansel Adams is well known for large format very high resolution imagery; I doubut he would have achieved the same results with today's cutting edge equipment.
...but I have it on good authority that he would have loved Grand Theft Auto:Vice City!
Even Chaplin finally made a 'talking' picture with the release in 1940 of the movie 'The Great Dictator'. Plus, Chaplin's reluctance to make a talking picture wasn't the result of some well thought out artistic stand. Rather he (along with several other actors Douglas Fairbanks and John Barrymore - yes those Barrymores) took part in a NBC produced radio broadcast. An experiment in the early days of radio decided to air not only in homes but in 55 select theaters. To say they had technical difficulties would be an understatement - it was even for the time, awful. The entire thing was ridiculed in the press and Chaplin expetially took it hard. So at least he had the excuse of 'Once Bitten, Twice Shy'. Had he not done that particular broadcase OR if it had gone well I dont see that he would have ever objected to making a talking film. So knowing the events I dont buy any Artistic Purity type of arguments. Then it was movies with sound, now it's digital photography. The medium moves on -
If you read some of his books on photography, you quickly realize that this guy would have been drooling over the kinds of image manipulation possible today.
It's obvious that he wanted to be able to do all this stuff, but due to the technology available to him, he could only do it in the camera/darkroom...
Whether an image is digitally manipulated or not has a lot more to do with the content than with the photographer.
Christopher Burkett doesn't need to manipulate pictures of nature, but portrait photographers often need to manipulate their shots to present the images of people the way those people think of themselves.
When you take a few pounds of weight off your subject without their knowledge (or you soften some wrinkles), and they dearly love that picture, but they dislike another similar picture that wasn't edited, you start to realize what's going on.
But all images will be manipulated intentionally or unintentionally for color balance and light.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
Now I have this picture in my head of guy telling people to keep smiling and hold their pose while he plugs another four fresh Compact Flash cards into his camera so he can take another shot.
Stefan
Ansel Adams would shoot an image with the dark room in mind. He would take a scene with a large format camera (exposure times of 10 minutes or more) and would wave pieces of cardboard in front of it to dodge the sky out. He would spend an entire day in the dark room dodging and burning and pefecting his image.
Were he to use a digital camera, he probably would have had fork over huge amounts of cash to get a medium format digital back -- Ansel was a huge fan of quality, and 14megapixels just doesn't cut it for the type of work he was doing. But when he shot a scene I could see him making many different shots with various exposures and then merged them back in in photoshop.
Output, though. He probably would have had to hit up one of Epson's 7700s -- those large format printers. I don't know if he would have liked the digital printing in comparison to his darkroom silver prints.
So I guess what it really comes down to is he would have loved the control of digital, but I don't believe the quality is quite yet. Or perhaps it is and I just can't afford it.
"So, Ansel Adams, yeah, I think he'd love it,' LoPinto said.
End of story, begin ad copy.
And that leads to the hypothetical question, which Nikon digital camera would Ansel Adams use?
"Considering his typical tendency to use high-quality, large-format cameras and his desire that it be handy and convenient, I suspect he would be attracted to our D100, for its size and versatility and overall digital image quality."
And it goes on and on like that. Gross. If I wanted advertisements posing as stories I'd go read Gamespy reviews.
Random and weird software I've written.
There are still folk shooting on Super8 film. There are folk that still edit using 3/4 videotape. There are artists that record using 1950's 4-track recorders.
There will always be a place for these older technologies. Even if the mainstream has passed them by, the great artist will find themselves drawn to one form over another, even if it is not the latest nor the greatest. I recall one photographer that still shoots using glass frames over film. I know of many independent movies shot on Super8 or even 16mm film, when several studios are shifting away from 35mm to digital or IMAX technology. These forms will not just up and dissapear, they will always be there. An anacronism, perhaps, but one to be cherished even today.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Interesting, that I never heard of Ansel till now. Very incredible pictures. Digital media is hardly being accepted by artistic organizations. At least the ones I've dealt with. My pictures were turned down. www.captivusphoto.com Oh well, could be the 1mp size. Regardless, I do no modifications to the pics. Just because its 1mp does not and should not in any way lower a pictures value. It is in a sense, a capture of history with the technology of the time. Digitally that is. Too bad most people place such stringent guidlines on art.
what next? text advertisements between stories? comeon slashdot!
Ansel Adams was a purest, being one of the founders of the f 64 club I find it hard to believe Ansal would transition to that medium. Like all Professional, and amateur photographers I'm sure he would have his foot in the door, learning playing and experimenting. I am also sure that when digital can match traditional black and white photography he would be there. But for know he would still be in the dark room.
I never meet the man, or anyone who did, so it is really hard to say if he would have gone digital.
Long dick: me.
You only have to see the work that Ansel put into making his prints - the recipe for making Moonrise, Hernandez NM was HUGE and it took a long time.
Ansel wasn't a conservative artist - he was an innovator. He'd have been pushing the vendors harder and harder to improve their products.
I have no doubt at all that he'd have been totally captivated by digital and using combinations of digital an analog.
Some have gone as far as to call him a fraud.
Was he using charred wood to draw on cave walls?
Was he using daguerrotype?
No, he was using the best tech available at the time, and he would be using the best tech available today if he were alive and well today (as opposed to alive, but old, decrepit and senile).
So the real question should be: Is digital better than film?
And no, I didn't RTFA.
Using famous names to attract attention to our lil' articles is not something that will draw me in...
You can't take the sky from me...
Ansel Adams was an expert at manipulating images in a way that made them look more natural, and never artificial. That said, outdoor photographers are only recently getting into digital film and the progress has been very slow.
Ansel Adams would not have adopted digital film, yet. Look at a full print of one of his photos. They were amazingly sharp. The man loved detail like no other. Digital photography does not yet provide the level of detail that Adams would have required.
Similarly todays outdoor photographers still commonly use large and medium format cameras using (in the case of color) films like Fuji Velvia (RVP 50), etc. These films deliver, IMO, a level of saturation that digital has yet to produce. It is close, but not there. Professional digital systems are beautiful, but in my opinion do not deliver the beauty of a professional analog print.
That said, some professionals are very good at what they do and their pictures rival the film pictures of the other 98% of us.
-Sean
...though I don't think he would've gone completely digital.
My 2 year old HP 2 MP digital camera is getting a little long in the tooth, but I'm amazed at the quality photos it takes in everyday situations--better than my 35mm. It's not as good in low-light conditions (e.g., sunrise/sunset landscapes), but that's because it's got an effective ISO of 100(!).
This is beating a dead horse. Use whatever medium works for you. I just bought a 4x5 Speed Graphic (old, but...mmm...grainless 16x20 prints...mmm!). Other people are buying Nikon D1Xes and are happy, too. There's no reason why both media can't coexist for the forseeable future, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.
LoPinto SELLS DIGITAL CAMERAS FOR A LIVING: of course he thinks Adams would want to buy one!!! Do you really expect the V.P. of SLR to say otherwise?!?!
The thing is, using something like Photoshop, you can do EVERYTHING that you can do in a darkroom, only a lot more, and a HELL of a lot more precisely. Film nuts just don't seem to want to admit that.
For me, the biggest thing holding me back from digital is that full-frame SLRs are still WAY too expensive for me to afford the upfront cost. I'm really into wide-angle photography, and full-frame is the only way to go. When full-frame SLR costs come down, that'll be one of the biggest remaining barriers left for many current holdouts.
I doubt it, because he used a large format camera. We don't have digital cameras that can match the resolution of a large format negative (though we're not far off). Once the technology gets there, he probably would. After all, perfecting images is a lot easier in photoshop than in the darkroom (if you ever see a large Asel Adams print, look at it from an angle and you can see all the individual spots where it has been spot toned to create that perfect image).
Here's a python script to generate that:
Save the output to a file, and view it with the image viewer of your choice. It's even in color, and lasts as long as you want it. No audio though, sorry.
my wife, who does portrait photography on the side (and she's really good, not just syaing that), says she will never go digital. film photography is semi-religious for photograhpers. and in fact, their is an art to film photography. it is art. i sometimes wonder about digital. yes, alot of photography can be done digitally. but film will never be replaced. especailly medium format and up.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Same thing we all do, make nekkid pics of Natalie Portman and post them on the net
He certainly would go postal seeing what the park service has done to Yosemite!
Arf!
Most of Adams' great work comes from view cameras. If digital handhelds (i.e. 35mm-like) were available which gave him the same resolution and control as film, he'd definitely play with them. However, until someone comes up with a digital film backplate for a large format view camera, there are many things than can't be done in the digital arena.
Moreover, I suspect he'd look at digital in the same way he did colour. He spent much of his career in a love/hate relationship with colour film and printing, and a good part of that is that he never had the time to get as proficient with it as he wanted (or considered necessary).
For fine art, digital is still in its pre-infancy--Daguerrotypes were a more able medium in many ways. In fact, one of the major differences between film and digital is that from almost day one, film has been capable of capturing depth and detail on a level that digital isn't even close to.
Nonetheless, Adams would be carrying and using digital for some things right now, and mercilessly riding the manufacturers to improve the technology. For fine art though, I don't see it for at least another half decade.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Here's a quote from a film made not only when Adams was alive, but during the time he was still doing good, vibrant work. It is a good assesment of the arsenal that Ansel used to create his photographs, and it is reasonable to extrapolate that he would have used digital gear were he working today, though not exclusively. Despite the assertations of many amateur photographers, film size does exceed that of 35mm and medium format, and it is from the large formats that acutance unavailable to digital, 35mm and medium format is to be had.
View, for example, Monolith, The Face of Half Dome in person and of a print that Adams himself made, and you see a tonality and level of detail that modern science has yet to be able to create digitally, at least in a form available to a consumer. That is not to say that it cannot or will not be done, because in my opinion it is a matter of time before digital surpasses ANY film. Nevertheless, that day is still in the future, at least in regards to a piece of 4X5 or 8X10 sheet film.
Beaumont Newhall narrated Larry Dawson's 1957 film, Ansel Adams, Photographer, and described Adams's photographic gear:
"...A fine craftsman employs different tools for different purposes. Item: one 8 x 10 view camera, 20 holders, 4 lenses -- 1 Cooke Convertible, 1 ten-inch Wide Field Ektar, 1 9-inch Dagor, one 6-3/4-inch Wollensak wide angle. Item: one 7 x 17 special panorama camera with a Protar 13-1/2-inch lens and five holders. Item: one 4 x 5 view camera, 6 lenses -- 12-inch Collinear, 8-1/2 Apo[chromatic] Lentar, 9-1/4 Apo[chromatic] Tessar, 4-inch Wide Field Ektar, Dallmeyer [...] telephoto.
"Item: One Hasselblad camera outfit with 38, 60, 80, 135, & 200 millimeter lenses. Item: One Koniflex 35 millimeter camera. Item: 2 Polaroid cameras. Item: 3 exposure meters. One SEI, and two Westons -- in case he drops one.
"Item: Filters for each camera. K1, K2, minus blue, G, X1, A, C5 &B, F, 85B, 85C, light balancing, series 81 and 82. Two tripods: one light, one heavy. Lens brush, stopwatch, level, thermometer, focusing magnifier, focusing cloth, hyperlight strobe portrait outfit, 200 feet of cable, special storage box for film.
[Ansel's car (a Cadillac) with platform pulls away from camera.]
"Item: One ancient, eight-passenger limousine with 5 x 9-foot camera platform on top."
He is dead. His work is art history now. Don't get me wrong, as a former photographer, a university level computer based art teacher, and large museum, I respect his work.
The simple truth is that he was a product of his time and that time was glass and emulsion. Yes thats right, glass. He started out shooting as someone who has hung Ansel Adams work in a photos on glass plates. Later he changed technologies and shot on the flexible film we all use today. Ultimately his time has past.
Were Ansel Adams alive today he might be creating art in code as many of us are doing now. He might be working with neural nets or a network of wifi nodes and location aware technology.
One might just as pointlessly ponder whether or not he would be producing Marxist institutional critique or gender based work.
To suggest that he would like digital photography is pointless. If he were alive today producing the same work he did in the 40's (no matter how beautiful) in any format we would say he was irrelevant and anachronistic.
Next up... Raphael loves Photoshop, Rembrandt digs Python and the Bauhaus goes over to OSX.
signifier-signified
www.34n118w.net
mining the urban landscape
If Ansel Adams, one of the most famous photographers of the 20th century, was still alive, would have he gone digital?
:o)
If Jimi Hendrix, one of the most famous and influental blues-based rock guitarists of the 20th century, was still alive, would he use digital effects?
It's stuff like this that initiate hours upon hours of philosophical banter in real life, and page after page of trolling and flamewars online
do() || do_not();
I have no doubt whatsoever that Ansel Adams would have gone digital...
Artists like any other profession like to expand their skills.. Ansel Adams created beautiful images with his cameras... why should it have mattered how the image is created... be it manipulation of light on film or manipulation of pixels on a screen..
It's the finished product that ultimately matters to the artist.
If Ansel Adams were around now it is entirely possible that he'd be pushing the envelope of digital imaging and thus enabling new kinds of technology. Market share drives some level of technology, but sometimes the important technology is driven more by the oddballs on the fringe that are asking for that extra little bit.
You need to hack the digital SLR camera to do this right, but the images you get back are astounding.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Ansel was always looking to improve his artwork through technology. I think he would have loved digital, but only would have used it for certain things. In my opinion, he would still have used 4x5, 5x7, 8x10 or larger format for almost all of his artwork. There is simply no way you can achieve the kind of subtelty or resolution he got with anything other than these large formats. Saying anything to the contrary is silly. It still pisses me off, that Macintosh ad that read "Shoot like Ansel, organize like Martha". The resolution of a 4x5 sheet of TMAX 100 is probably somewhere up there in the 80 megapixel range -- not only that, the contrast range kicks digital's butt. Not only that, the limitations of the photographic darkroom inspired some of Ansel's best work. And at any rate, Ansel would NEVER have given up the movements that you get on a large format camera. He'd be using digital backs, not Canon 1Ds's.
For people currently learning to shoot, go with digital. It's a much better way to learn. My father (who used to teach at Nikon School) says he would have learned to shoot in 1/4 the time.
Ansel Adams and the group of photographers - the f64 group - essentially worked to promote a style established by Edward Weston. It has much in common with Stieglitz' Photo-Secession - the concept of absolute honesty combined with absolute control of materials.
Adams' main contribution to photographic technology was his 'Zone' exposure system, which combines exposure, development and printing into a single system. It was like a very early ColorSync (even if it was in black and white).
Photography before f64 and the Photo-Secession was only considered 'art' if it was manipulated. Most Victorian photographic art was sacherinely allegorical. When photographers such as Weston and Adams came onto the scene, their images were considered shockingly raw.
To suggest that Adams was somehow considered a fraud would be to misconstrue the history of photography.
...but what camera would Jesus use?
Remember, he was one of the founders of f/64, the whole point of which was the revolutionary idea that Pictures should be tack sharp. (Quite unfashionable at the time)
He'd defintely have a very good scanner and printer, and a current workstation with Photoshop. He spent as much time in the darkroom as he did taking the photos in the first place. I suspect he'd be pulling out new detail from his exposures in the 1930s that nobody else could even see.
--Mike--
I think Ansel Adams would use whatever means he had to put his ideas on the paper. And that's the important bit: it was about those large flat things to hang on the wall. His prints are just amazing to see in person. It's not just about the composition of the images (which is superb) but the execution on the paper. I'm sure a digital camera with Photoshop could be used for all the techniques he employed in the darkroom -- but you can't print them out to look like a fine platinum print on fibre paper. (Yet.)
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
Ansel Adams' philosophy regarding photography was *zero* manipulation by the photographer.
He was a founding member of the f64 group who thought that photography should include the greatest amount of information in a photograph with the least amount of the photographer's hand other than composition.
Their photographic methodology included:
* Largest negative size (more information)
* Contact prints _only_ (more information on final print)
* Use the smallest aperature, i.e. f64 (more information)
The use of contact prints means that there was almost no manipulation in the final print (other than choosing the correct exposure).
Since his entire philosophy on photography was to maximize the information, it seems obvious to me that he wouldn't use digital (yet). Even with the 14 megapixel backs for medium format cameras, these don't even come close to the information content in a large format negative.
would Mapplethorpe have a pay-per-view pr0n site?
(http://www.mapplethorpe.org/)
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
I think Adams would have used digital cameras, when the need was great enough, but I doubt he would have loved digital cameras. Adams was a traditionalist, he didn't just embrace the latest gizmo. If you read his books: The Camera, The Negative, The Print you would probably get the same impression as I, that Adams was not overtly embracive of the latest technology "advances".
Digital photography certainly has its advantages, but when it comes to creating truly beautiful photos film is still the best medium. Adams would have not sacrificed quality for ease-of-use or to save a penny. He may use digital as an alternative to a pollaroid for testing shots - maybe.
Digital makes lots of sense for professional photographs that are selling prints and can save money on developing and have a quicker turn around (sometimes). It also works well for photojournalism. It's less appealing to people who want to capture a shot, with the best quality possible, and are not concerned with lots of special affects - they want a realistic representation of the subject.
You have to remember that taking beautiful black and white pictures is an artform and much of the art is in the dark room. You should also know that people like Adams are not shooting with a 35mm camera, large format cameras take amazing pictures that I doubt will be bested by a digital camera.
LoRider
Have you seen the picture of his enlarger that had something like 20 lightbulbs in an arry in the lighthouse with each one of them brought out to a toggle switch? The sort of mind that builds such a device could only be enthused about digitial technology.
An even more interesting question would be how he would create his prints. I suspect he would have a Lightjet printer, though the new inkjets with grayscale inks might have been interesting to him.
One of Ansel's most interesting quotes was to the question "what kind of camera should I get" His response was "the biggest one you can carry." He used 8x10 view cameras in his prime, but had no regrets using the Hasselblad system in his older years. If you translate "biggest" into "the highest resolution and dynamic range", there would be no problem with using a digital camera
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
If someday digital can match the dynamic range and resolution of silver prints, then I may reconsider. Until then, Luddites Unite!
Both film and digital have their respective strengths and weaknesses, their best uses and those situations where they are not the best choice-so why do we try to make it into camps in a holy war between film and digital? So maybe he would, maybe he wouldn't-my guess is he would at least try both. I think he could and would make quality images no matter which media he used, because it's the photographer's eye and technique that truly make the difference.
Having spent some time in a darkroom, I understand that knowing how you'd like something to turn out and actually being able to it (dodge, burn and feather the edges) are two different things. A keen sense of timing and a deft hand are just as important as artistic vision in the finished product.
The other humbling thing I learned was that if it wasn't on the negative, it wasn't going to be in the print. You can't coax a masterpiece from a mediocre piece of film. Adams planned his shots, set up his big old camera, then waited for the scene to appear and the light to be just right. Click! You only get one chance when you do it this way because it might take half a day to prepare. His negatives were awesome!You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
All by chance, eh?
Since Ansel Adams worked primarily with large format cameras - 4" x 5" or 8" x 10" negatives - which digital cannot even begin to match, I think that Mr. LoPinto is smoking dope if he thinks Adams would have bothered with digital for serious work.
If you're planning on beating 8x10, you're going to need another order of magnitude...
200 to 1000 megapixels for ASA 50 film in that size.
This may be quibbling about "digital camera made today", but I doubt there are night images 100% impossible with digital, as CCD scientific imaging cameras are in use for astronomy that can detect a single photon.
Spot on. Astronomers jumped to CCDs for the higher efficiency - it takes considerably fewer photons to register luminosity in a CCD bin than even the best films can acheive. All the optical and infra-red pictures I saw during my astronomy years (about 5-9 years ago) were taken on 1Mpixel cameras.
Having said that, these 1Mpixel cameras were cryogenically cooled, so I don't believe they count as the most portable of devices...
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
an 8x10 at 300 dpi is hardly the benchmark of quality. i am sure you don't need 720 MP to capture that level of detail. you might want to check your math and your assumptions.
Still it was true that Adams himself considered the majority of the art of photography to be done in the darkroom. I think his primary interest in digital photography (esp. as someone else pointed out, a system like Kodac's digital backs) would have been in being able to more flexibly "develop" photographs using tools such as Photoshop (or the Gimp ;)
I'm not suggesting that his photos would be altered (though the amount of dodging and burning he did came pretty close to that) but that he could experiment with different ways of "developing" a single shot.
So true. Needless to say, I settled for a 20-year-old MF and have never regretted it. My point is, I don't get the impression Adams (and others like him) really cared what he was shooting with so much as composition, tonality, lighting, etc. He could have produced brilliant shots with just about anything that stayed in focus.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Ansel Adams, in my opinion, would have never touched digital. This guy used 8X10 glass negatives that took minutes to expose. All of his works were primarily about composition. He then perfected them in the darkroom. If you really look at his work, you understand his dedication to every detail and perfection. Anyone who thinks this guy would have settled for digital is completely mistaken.
This article is definitely geared to cause a strong opinions in people. It is pure flamebiat. How can someone know what a dead person whould do? Are they phychic?
He's not alive and we cannot answer this question! The real question is what would YOU do.
"You're on my side and the dark side, like Lando Calrissian?" --Gimpy, Undergrads
He'd have showed up at a site, spend a day or two taking photos with his digital camera, gone home for a couple of weeks to look things over, and then come back with his real camera and gps coordinates for the shots he liked.
What's with all the photography questions on /. lately, anyway? This is the first site I'd come to with a linux question, but not a photography question... photo.net is a much better place for this sort of thing -- even if this question does sound like a good way to start another digital vs. film flamewar (always amusing).
As for the question of whether Ansel would use digital -- I think he'd use it for some purposes in its present form, but digital doesn't match the tonality of his best work, and doing B&W (which is what he was best known for) is generally a clunky process in the digital realm. I think he'd have (at least) one for some of the flexibility it offers, but he'd still be doing his best work with a view camera with a wooden tripod...
Ha ha ha
he might have gone color...
Yoda, looking dismayed: Begun, the photography flame wars have...
here's a LINK and here's ANOTHER. I'd love to see the Video of him using the Microwave!
I like microcars
With hundreds of interacting chemicals, modern photographic film is arguably the most complex product of modern technology. I guess that there are still a few areas where chemical technology exceeds computer/electronic technologies. It's not suprising that digital camera enthusiasts may have to wait a hundred years to catch up.
:)
--chemist turned programmer
Ansel Adams would, without a doubt, love what is going on with digital. He was a total photography geek. He was always trying the newest camera, lens, film, meter, and darkroom technique, and he loved sharing the things he learned with his students.
Stop into a good book store and flip through The Camera and The Negative, two of his books. He had an inquisitive, scientific mind, and deeply understood the chemistry of development and the physics of light. He is the prototypical hacker, focusing on photography.
While he was ultimately concerned with creating a print of the utmost quality, he was not the least bit conservative in his tools or technique.
Ansel Adams would have been first on line for each new generation of digital camera.
> "Considering his typical tendency to use > high-quality, large-format cameras and his
> desire that it be handy and convenient, I
> suspect he would be attracted to our D100, for
> its size and versatility and overall digital
> image quality."
He may have shot on film and manipulated the photos on computer after scanning it with a drum scanner - but there's no way he'd be using such low resolution digital cameras as a D100.
Remember Ansel Adams used a view camera that took 8x10 inch film.
Consider that the Nikon D100 can nowhere near match the resolution of high grain 35mm film. It only has a 6.1 megapixel image sensor, whereas any decent film scanner can extract atleast 12 megapixels from 35mm film - and nowhere near get down the grain level (eg. try finding the grain on Fuji velvia on a Nikon coolscan scanner).
Since 10x8 inches is roughly 14 times the area of 35mm * 23mm to get that level of detail you'd need atleast a 168 megapixel image.
Consider that Adam's was not in a hurry to get his images he was after the maximal control and quality possible (he spent a lot of the late years of his life re-printing his earlier photos).
How many people here have actually done B&W digital work? Sure, you can run grain filters, simulate over/underdeveloping, simulate the effects of different developers with PhotoShop, but it is tedious and it almost never fails to look like a digital image.
How many here have seen an actual print done by Ansel, not one of the posters or digitized images. They don't even come close to the real thing. Ansel was a beautiful B&W printer. I think that the printing alone would have frusturated him. Sure it's all well and good to have an image on your screen, now get it in a form I can actually hold. Ansel also had a very well-researched printing method. Kept under good conitions, his prints will last far beyond most things that are printed today. Computer printing isn't even in infancy yet. I have not yet seen a digital B&W print that came close to a good print on silver.
There's also the archival qualities of digital images vs negatives. Now before you think this is an easy answer, I can throw my negatives into storage now, and in 50 years take them out and print them just as well as I can print them tomorow. In 50 years, we won't be using anything close to the same file formats, media and lets not forget how rapidly data-mediums deteriorate. So in order to archivally store digital images they need to be maintained constantly, moved to new formats, backed up and so on.
Then there is the viseral quality of being in a wet darkroom with your fingers in your work. The water is running and it's almost like a little trance you get yourself into while you work. Sure digital is great, no dust spots, undo, multiple files, and perfect duplicates. All that considered though, film will never die, because, as humans, we don't like everything exactly the same, and part of appreciating the art is seeing the artist's hand. Part of art, is having your hands in it, and I know that, for myself, and many others, we will never be satisfied with simply a digital camera and Photoshop.
Ansell Adams would be into it, sure. But that 50ASA film you would like to write off, had way more latitiude than your megabuck digital back.
A monochrome digital back is going to cost heaps, because they won't hit the mass market at all. Unless you have a pressing commercial need, you might as well go with a good mainstram DSLR and save your money.
Avoiding post-processing is like sending the film to the 1-hour photo lab. The results are quick, and look like it.
You're Dreaming!
Anyone who claims that photography is about objectively and accurately portraying the real scene knows very little about the nonlinear properties of human vision, film, and image reproduction systems and they know even less about art.
Very insightful. The only person who can do this is God. Other than that, you are placing some sort of value judgement on the photo the moment you place the camera. You are imposing a certain framework on the image itself by the act of adjusting exposure, setting focus, choosing a focal range.
Artists understand this and know how to manipulate it. But to capture "reality" one hundred percent is to become God, viewing the entire universe as it is in one glimpse - from galaxies to atoms.
I do take some exception to the article's implication that digital photography means digital trickery. One can use a digital camera to take pictures honestly.
Why do people assume that because an image is on analog film, it has not been tampered with? Conversly, why do they assume that a digital picture HAS?
Perhaps the time has come for some digital camera vendor to produce a camera that digitally signs pictures so that we can verify that they have not been modified....
This is true. However, its also worth pointing out that he would produce a number of prints which did have the right contrast and mood before making a print that he felt was 'right'.
His technology really was the state-of-the-art for bringing out the lighting effects that matched his view. He might very well use digital methods today to do the same things he did then with chemical processing.
Wether he'd succumb to the temptation to move the moon into a more 'artful' location in a picture is another question.
if ($it != $onething) {$it = $another;}
Maybe 1.09 billion pixels (40,784 x 26,800) is enough to beat it :
:
http://www.tawbaware.com/maxlyons/gigapixel.htm
It is done with a Canon D60 6 MPixels DSLR and PTAssembler + PanoramaTools, two great freeware and easy to use tools.
http://www.tawbaware.com/ptasmblr.htm
Don't forget to check the others pictures in "Max Lyons Digital Image Gallery"
http://www.tawbaware.com/maxlyons/
A recent poll of company spokesmen across all industries indicates that Ansel Adams would have liked their products.
No, you're wrong. If you have skills, then analog is the way to go. You can be precise, do anything that is possible in digital (yes anything), do it repeatedly, and get much higher quality results (for now - once a magic mp threshold is reached this will change).
Digital makes it easier for unskilled peoples to get into photomanipulation.
You don't have to ask what the greats would be doing...you only have to look at what everyone else is doing. It's likely he would eventually go the way everyone else HAS to go...
Photography is changing forever. With fewer ppl needing to have film developed, the cost of devloping chemicals will begin to increase. As the consumer market begins to switch to digital, the cost of all film photography will go up. Therefore, one of the reasons why 35mm is so popular dissappears...it's used for EVERYTHING from disposable cameras to professional SLR cameras. So, what do you have, there's fewer stores devoted to film developing and those that CAN develop film spend most of their time making prints from digital images.
Consumer digital cameras are already capable of 35mm quality. Professional digital cameras are capable of Medium format quality. You are seeing some 35mm owners switching to digital now. The backyard photographer is switching to digital. Once resolution (for large format cameras) and the last few remaining issues with digital are ironed out, professional photographers will either switch to digital or be defined by the fact that they haven't.
Prints from lithographic plates, from negatives, from analog tapes, etc. etc. etc. This is a huge issue that artists have been dealing with for a couple of hundred years now. I suggest you read Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."0 4/VPAB04_98/stud ent/Cox/ben1.html
http://citd.scar.utoronto.ca/VPAB
It's available all over the place and the basis of a bunch of post-modern thought.
This is typical digital marketing BS at it's finest!! "Let's say Adams would have gone digital, then people will feel less insecure about buying our gizmos, and digital photogaphers can continue to think they are photographers and not digital imagers". I'm about to puke.
Some of Anels Adams photographs are controversial because of how much he manipulated them in the lab. For instance he wanted to take a photograph of nice scene but didn't want the building in it. So he dodged and burned out the building in his lab. Then no one could tell there was a building in the photo. Digital would let Ansel attain his goals much easier.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
Adams was a talented photographer, but his work in the dark room is what made him famous.
While I'd love to be able to shoot like Adams, I'd kill to be able to print like him.
--
You sure got a purty mouth...
I don't think so. I think he was strongly in favor of authenticity in his work. He didn't work in water colors or oil for a reason.
One of the things about photography that makes it an art, rather than just an excercize in recording things with instruments, is context, and the way context is used, such as depth of field, framing, etc. None of which is encouraced by a snap-snap-snapshot mindset with 128MB flash cards and ni-cd batteries as the only constraint from snap-snap-snap.
A Good Intro to NetBS
To me, the dynamic range of digital cameras is the biggest problem. Many of the affordable cameras save their images in JPEG or TIFF formats, with an effective color depth of 32-bits per pixel.
I want at least 32-bit floating point per each RGB channel (96-bit per pixel).
I took some of my best pictures on black & white film that I developed myself back when I was at high school. I love the convenience of digital - but the crappy dynamic range of the saved files is a killer. Having the camera arbitrarily decide what range it's going to use when you press the shutter button severely limits what you can do in the "darkroom" (for me - Paint Shop Pro) when you're post-processing. It's all to easy to find the not-quite random "video fuzz" in images if the lighting wasn't point-and-shoot perfect.
Is this the same Christopher Burkett who's big in graphics application piracy circles?
You want a copy of Photoshop or Lightwave, Chris is your man.
Most people seem to stress Adams' technical bent in such discussions, but if you read his books and speak with people that studied/taught under him directly, he really stressed the importance of the process of previsualization of the final photographic print product... the Zone System was apparently devised as much as a method of improving the accuracy of previsualization as for any other reason. Adams was a pragmatist. Since a digital system shortens the cycle between observation/reaction to a scene/event and the ability to view output, I am CERTAIN he would have adopted the new technology as rapidly as any other. Don't forget that he bequethed his negatives to the University of Arizona - one of his stated reasons for this was that they had one of the earliest digital imaging research programs in that part of the country - he seemed to love the concept of future generations reinterpreting his negatives in the same way musicians interpret musical scores - Adams actively participated in the production process for one of his last books (Yosemite and the Range of Light) and was very positive regarding the quality of the laser-scan halftones produced for that piece. If I recall correctly this was one of the first books produced using that process.
If Ansel Adams was around today, he would have been in an Apple switcher ad talking about how he got a digital camera for Christmas, downloading Windows' drivers on Christmas day and computers that go "arrggghhh!"
And the world would not know of Janie Porche.:-)
I'm sure Ansel Adams would have closely followed any new photographic technology but, if you look past the marketing hype into the actual science of CCD and related technology, digital is significantly inferior to film technology on most fronts.
See this for an in-depth comparison.
this story is pathetic. Ansel was about craft and artistic expression. Digiheads are about snap it, fix it later in photoshop. Ansel would loathe digiheads, there is no question.
I think he was the type that embraced technology and used every tool available to him. I think he would have at least tried and even liked it.
You can read the whole transcript here.
Experience Transcript
His Gear
Sophie
If you really knew what Photoshop could do, you'd change your tune. Doing things like dodging & burning, etc., are _orders of magnitude_ more precise with digital images over analog, and there are things you just CAN'T do with analog that you can with digital. It's not even close! You're so far wrong I suspect you're a troll, really, but whatever.
The only big area where digital loses out to analog for now is in making large prints. But for prints of 8x10 or smaller, analog still loses out in colour photos.
Feel free to check out some reviews by professionals on what a camera like the Canon EOS-1Ds can do before you spout more nonsense.
Ansel Adams shot on 8x10, 4x5, 35mm, and other formats. He didn't focus on negative size, rather on using the correct format for the job at hand.
Adams never really liked color as a medium, he did dabble in it, and I think his work was amazing, but he was always in favor of B&W. I think that with him thinking like that about color I don't think he would have felt too good about moving to a newer technology. Color was avaiable to him, but he didn't use it, I doubt he would use digital just because it is there, but I imaggine he would use it to some extent. I personally am looking for a Digital SLR only to replace the dark room for convience, chemicals aren't cheep. I would choose film over digital any day for an artistic project though, and I imagine Adams would feel somewhat the same.
404
Warhol was a hack.
Andy warhol was an amazing manipulator of people, and one of the best marketing minds of the 21st century. In terms of artistic abilities, however, he wasn't very good. His stuff is visually interesting, but in terms of skill & technique, he was not at the same level as a De Vinci, Vermer, or Escher. Hell, he traced most of the time.
I think that De Vinci would probably be using digital photography, and probably taking them apart; who really cares is Warhol would?
RandomAndInteresting.comdefending the world from stupidity since 1979
You overestimate the resolution of film camera systems. An 8x10 camera does not have proportionately more pixels than a 35mm camera. It does have higher resolution, but the main reason for using it is tonality (i.e., more silver grains available to represent one pixels--kind of the film equivalent of bits-per-pixel).
Velvia at 4x5 doesn't really give you 200 MPixel of resolution; outside a camera, it may give you 13000x16000 lines of resolution, but photographic lines are not like pixels--a pixel contains a lot more information than a line on a resolution chart. Furthermore, inside a real large format camera pointing at a real-world scene, you simply won't be able to get that kind of resolution out of the film.
You also underestimate the resolution of digital. Digital doesn't stop with 10 Mpixel SLR hacks, you can get digital backs for medium and large format cameras. Something like that gives you 140 Mpixels with 16 bits per channel, something that film doesn't even remotely get close to.
In fact, if it's resolution you want, you can even build one yourself: common letter sized scanners can be adapted to fit on the back of 8x10 view cameras.
Ansel: I wonder what it would be like to use a camera from the future.
Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.
This is very true. Adams employed the Zone system throughout the photographic process from exposure and developing of the film to printing on paper. He published a great book called Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs which goes into great detail on how each of 40 of his most well-known images were produced. In many cases he describes how he assigned Zone values to various elements of the photograph at the time of exposure and carried them through the whole production of the image.
Adams planned his shots, set up his big old camera, then waited for the scene to appear and the light to be just right. Click! You only get one chance when you do it this way because it might take half a day to prepare. His negatives were awesome!
Yes but not always, in the aforementioned book I believe he described photographing Moonrise over Hernandez, New Mexico in quite a hurry after seeing the image set itself up while driving close to dusk. He knew his technology so well that he was able to apply the Zone principles quickly and still get the shot. So while he did plan many of his shots, he could on occasion think on his feet and get a good negative quickly.
--zawada
In Soviet Russia, the Beowulf cluster imagines you!
Why, yes...Yes I do.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Using digital cameras brings an amazing amount of flexibility to the art form. There is also an element of safety to consider in that many artists, not just photographers, were and continue to be poisoned by the medium they worked in. Sad to think of the devastating effects on someone like Jackson Pollack.
The main reasons:
Latitude
According to Adams, black and white film can be said to have 10 stops of latitude from complete shadow to white. CCD's only capture at best 5 stops. Colour positive (slide film) is better than digital, and positive has far less latitude than black and white film. Therefore the tonality will be inferior with digital as compared to black and white film. As well, with reduced latitude there is less of an ability to manipulate the image.
Resolution
Adams shot on an 8 x 10 camera. That is, the negative was 8 inches by 10 inches. There will be nothing digital in the near future with this resolution that can be carried by the photographer. (as a guess, you would need at least a 600 megapixel digital camera to match the resolution of Adams' 8 X 10 photos).
Additionally, people are trying to make the argument that because Adams liked to manipulate he might like digital. However, he liked to make sure the image he took was exposed correctly from the beginning and and the negative produced correctly so that it was ready for the end image he had in mind. In other words, taking any picture and manipulating it to get the end result he wanted was not what he did. The entire image that he would produce was planned from concept to framed image on a gallery wall. His manipulation started with the time of day, the time of year, etc when the image was captured, to knowing from the outset what chemicals he would use to process the negative(s) etc. He made sure the lighting he wanted was there... all of that. He has stated that making a fine print from an inferior negative is sometimes possible, but success if more likely from a good negative. And getting a good negative started before even putting the camera on the tripod. It has been documented that he would look at a scene as he passed by and make plans on how to shoot it to get the result he wanted. Only when conditions and his plans came together would he shoot. It seems to me that he was more methodical than even his photograph and darkroom techniques indicate.
The problem I have with digital is less with the medium than with the laziness it breeds in the photographers that use it. (Kind of like with programming and VB... nothing wrong with VB, I think, except that due to its initial ease of use, it can breed poor programming habbits... not the languages fault, it is the users fault... but that is off topic!) Many think that they can shoot any way they want, and then can put the missing elements in the final result, whether it be lighting or whatever. The thing is, you cannot put into the image what isn't there to begin with. I think if one takes care to compose the image with the kind of care you would take with film, digital is fine. And if the image is captured well, then the digital manipulations that you follow with, can really be something to look at.
Anyway, I think when the latitude and the resolution of digital improve, then we could ask the same question, and maybe get a positive answer. In the meantime, digital is still good for colour photos used in magazines and vacations. But I still think a good medium (or even 35mm) format film camera in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing, will outperform digital at least in the near term.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
If digital photography could match the lattitude of film, as well as the resolution of an 8x10 negative, then sure, I could see Ansel Adams using digital.
But it can't. Even 35mm film still has more lattitude than digital, and I've yet to see a digital camera that can match the extreme resolution of an 8x10 negative (without having to resort to stitching together several images).
I suspect that Ansel would have at least TRIED digital photography. As to his particular tastes and methods, who knows. He did enjoy experimenting with various processes both orthodox and avant gard, so who is to say.
By the same token, Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart, might also have enjoyed the current engraving/typesetting technology and MIDI. But, artists's creativity is usually fueled by the challenge of limited means, media, or materials.
Heck, McGyver could disarm a nuclear warhead with a toothpick, a broken sea shell, and a tampon string...but I digress...
Your mileage may vary.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
Adams radically manipulated images - the show at San Francisco MOMA a couple years ago showed before and after prints - and also how the degree of manipulation changed over his career. In general, he manupilated more as his career progressed.
I think he would have explored digital photography, provided he could have found an output medium to handle the dynamic range of his photographs.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Woody is standing in line for the theater while this guy standing in front of them is spouting all this stuff about Marshall MacLuhan.
They start arguing about things and the guy starts spouting off about how he teaches communications at columbia so he knows what he's talking about.
Then Woody walks over and pulls Marshall MacLuhan into the scene who says to the man "You know nothing of my work. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing."
Bill and Ted?
This is a little like asking if Alexander Graham Bell would use a cel phone or if Da Vinchi would use Photoshop. I think they would use the best tool for expressing their ideas. Some folks still paint with a brush. (savages)
What?
Read Ansels's book "The Negative". His basic philosophy was to get the negative the best it could be, that way you minimise the fooling around afterwards in the darkroom. He WAS a master in the darkroom, but that was only to fix-up the print where his negative wasn't up to scratch for representing What He Saw. He was into honesty of image, so all those digital manipulation tricks, moving, enhancing, "perfecting" nature would horrify him.
He would mess around with digital to see what it could do, and as an artistic medium in its own right, much as he did with polaroids, but i doubt it would replace his first love of View+50ISO.
John.
I'm glad someone actually brought this idea into the discussion, thought I'd have to do it. We were having a discussion of a similar sort not too long ago in a photography class I was taking.
The debate over digital vs. film photography is like the debate on cds vs. vinyl. There is a place for both, but the newer technology will not eradicate the older anytime soon. Digital photography does not yet have the resolution of film but will someday. Even with the resolution, images of the same scene taken with digital cameras do not look the same as those taken with film. It is all in the eye of the beholder, but prints from film negatives have a more pleasant feel to them just as audio on vinyl can (perhaps often) have a more pleasant feel to the same audio on cd.
There is the point that digital images can remove grain. However, it is the grain in a film image that can make it great. Some feel that audio on vinyl sounds better than that of cd because of the barely audible background hiss of the needle in the groove. Some musicians, notably Portishead, use the audio characteristics of vinyl for effect, recording music they want to sample to vinyl then sampling off that vinyl for the final track. Some photographers, like me if I could get it right, do the same with the grain of film stock.
After all that, it just seems to come down to one thing. Just as audio tape and cds have not completely displaced vinyl from the world of music, digital photography will not displace film photography. Like the parent said, artists (and people in general) are drawn to certain mediums. If someone likes film over digital, they'll use film (even if the major producers cease production and they have to make their own).
"I swear I won't break you if you let me take you where the willows never weep" -- Switchblade Symphony
All Kurds should be violently raped in the ass. They are no better then Saddam. Ask Turks.
I can assure you that resolving two lines does not tell you all the story about the amount the information available in the image.
Digital has less noise, consistent and predicatable grain. Sensor surface is flatter then film and can be focused better. It gives you more inforamtion to use then a comparably resolving film. And at some point - not too far out, you hit the lens limit.
And information is not everything. With digital you can shoot more, store more and process it much better without degradation and loss whatsoever.
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
I bet if you examine the full image closely there are some horrid artefacts. For one thing, the 196 separate images were taken over something like 19 minutes so the shadows won't be consistent. For another, the stitching program will have introduced some distortion into the final image. It's quite an impressive achievement but needs quite a bit of work to perfect the technique.
It would help if the camera were mounted on a rigid frame and moved rapidly between images by accurate motors. You could probably get the time down to a couple of minutes though having a solid enough frame to overcome lens shake as the camera is jerked around between imaging points would be hard (also wear and tear on the camera would be huge). I suspect you could also minimise time-related issues by moving the camera between imaging points along a Hilbert curve, though perhaps this would depend on the circumstances. In any case, to get something like this working would be a massive undertaking well beyond most amateurs.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
...obviously
Posting AC because I don't want SCO to track me down.
I know - it is painful to admit that your pile of very expensive toys is obsolete.
Good digital back already has more information then a medium format film (like scanning backs). Combined with far superiour capabilities of a digital darkroom image quality is already leagues ahead.
Sell your toys while you still can. Nobody will give a dime for them few years from now.
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Lens can not resolve more then a modern digital sensor can capture. A lot of serious work nowdays is done with digital. The rest of professional are jsut going through therapy after they learn that their expensive equipment is already obsolete.
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
The opposite is true as well. Rotating an image 5 degrees in photoshop will degrade the image, but won't with analog. Let's not even start talking about what's possible with palladium or (if you can afford it) platinum prints.
Feel free to check out some reviews by professionals on what a camera like the Canon EOS-1Ds can do before you spout more nonsense.
I own one, it's low quality compared to my H-1, but i don't like lugging $10k+ everywhere i go, so it's definitely suitable for its role.
Just because i disagree with you, and happen to know some very, very talented darkroom artists, doesn't mean the above is either a troll or nonsense.
How do I know that? I processed astronomical images for quite a long period in my life. That's the area where you need every last bit of data available. That's the only area of photography where resolution and dynamic range, and nothing else matters (like digital postprocessing that snaks film abilities silly). Most modern telescopes switched from film to solid state detectors. They give you more information. Do not argue - you will be wrong. I have personally worked with images taken with 2 meter lenses - at the physical limits of resolution. Tell me you tried anything close in size and complexity. We used to work with film - it is all computerized SS detectors now. All of them.
They also give you much more flexibility in processing, but that's not important in astronomy.
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
I can take a 3.1 MP photograph with a Kodak DCS 560 that will look a thousand times clearer, crisper, and livelier than a 3.1 MP photograph from a $150 point and shoot (like the Fuji Finepix A330). The difference? Those 3.1 MP need to be quicky and accurately processed in memory into a proper TIFF or JPG image that will hold all of the original image data. Additionally, the CCD imager geometry makes a difference (Fuji's high end cameras like the S3 Pro use octagonal imager elements, most people use very closely spaced rectangular or square imager elements). There are other things, such as color depth, saturation, luminosity, alpha, and so on. Even todays 20 MP cameras still can't beat plain old emulsion based films. Purists will still use film, especially in art, and scientists will still use film for it's adaptability (making a new kind of film is faster and cheapter than making a new type of imager). The high-res digitals will largely remain the domain of media photographers, small photo studios, and the hobbyist who has $2,000 to $40,000 to blow.
There is a simpler solution :
You can use a 22 millions pixels medium format digital back. 50 pictures will be enough to generate the same result in a lot less time.
True, he did eventually have an assistant (Ted Dresser, I think is his name) whom he trusted to make prints, but they were according to printing formulas he would work out. It wasn't so much direction as a Master Chef's recipe and technique replicated by a Souce Chef.
if it wasn't on the negative, it wasn't going to be in the print. You can't coax a masterpiece from a mediocre piece of film. Adams planned his shots, set up his big old camera, then waited for the scene to appear and the light to be just right.
You should see some of those negatives. To call them mediocre is to elevate them. Most printers would give up. The extensive dodging and burning that he is known for, wasn't manipulation so much as compensation.
His negatives were awesome!
For the most part, but not always. The infallable legend is a bit exagerated. He did preach: Visualize, Capture, Render (my terms) as a single process that should mesh perfectly, and mostly he did as preached. But when step 2 fell short of easily rendering step 1, he had an amazing talent to correct.
The potato it is uninformed.
so I think we would love programs like Adobe.
As for switching to digital, not yet. He used HUGE format negatives, when today's digital can barely keep up with 35mm.
Even though Ansel Adams is known for his f/32 work and careful use of the zone system he was aldo a fan of innovation
We used 35mm cameras as well as 8x10s... so he would have gone digital, starting with the Apple Quicktake
Ecuador always on my heart....
Why not? He went Poloriod (when he shot the official photograph of President Jimmy Carter).
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
...people have made monster photographs from multiple negatives for a very long time. If you're doing to "many photos equals one" stunt, you're going to have to get into the hundred gigapixel range.
Ansel Adams became famous for using too much contrast when making prints of his images. There are many much better photographers. They all use very large format negatives, much bigger than 35mm film negatives, which are still higher resolution than the best digital cameras. Digital technology is not yet ready for artistic photography.
Vote for Pedro
Curiously, this question is just discussed today on largeformatphotography.info, possibly the main web forum for discussion of large format photography (the kind that was practised by Adams).
Ansel Adams was often willing to give up a bit of his "eye" to technology, as is evident in his use of a densitometer when calibrating his exposure and development techniques, but I very much doubt that Minor White, who was also a Zone System devotee, would be enthralled by digital technology, but his method of applying the system varied signifigantly from that of Adams. He prefered for himself, and taught his students, to learn to see the zones in a scene with the eye, and to calibrate one's technique by eye.
Read, L
Your view of digital photography seems limited to what you see available as consumer gear.
But in addition to digital SLRs, you can get digital backs for medium and large format cameras. Those will give you hundreds of megapixels of data at bit depths and dynamic ranges far exceeding what you can get with film. You also get the same handling and control you would get with regular MF and LF cameras.
It may be a "piece of cake" to make a 30x40 from a 6 MP camera, and is it to make one from a webcam too. Problem is the *quality* won't compare to 8x10. To see the level of quality attainable with LF film even scanned at a modest resolution, check this page of landscape photographs.
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About 2 years ago I projected some images I took with some Agfa Scala 200 ASA film. Measured the size of the frame and the number of grains within a small square within that frame.
On average (the grains are random shapes and sizes, within limits), it came out to about 12 million grains within the full frame.
So it would take about 12 Mega pixels to match Scala 200 (maybe a little less than 12, to take into account the random nature of the grains which can make an image look less detailed due to the larger grains spoiling the effect of the whole). I imagine some of Fuji's highest resolution films would be 25 million grains or beyond.
I think the biggest hurdle to digital photography is not the CCD resolutions, but the available memory. Ever manipulated a high quality jpeg? The artifacts that were not noticable suddenly jump out at you when you run a filter, for example. So really high quality compression or lossless compression would be nice. A raw image at 25 Mpixels is a full 71 Megabytes for 24bit colour.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
I was fortunate enough to meet Ansel Adams before he died. He was a wonderful and most unpretentious man. Contrary to much that has been written about him, he was not this high priest that some made him out to be. Ansel Adams spent much of his working life as a commercial photographer, and a documentary film of him late in his life showed that he liked conveniences as much as anyone else.
In fact, the film showed him walking out of his darkroom with a test strip, tearing it off along the edge of a table and microwaving the photo (yes, microwaving it!) to get it to dry faster. Given some of the results I have seen in the hands of talented photographers who have worked hard in digital, I have a feeling Mr. Adams would have gotten behind it too.
One final thought: many of you have talked about 35mm size digital cameras as being the high end of digital photography. NOT TRUE. There are any number of high-end makers of extremely high resolution camera backs for medium format and large format cameras, including view cameras like the 4X5" Sinar. These are the staple of many advertising photo studios today. Please know that in many cases, the CCD (and most likely, CMOS) backs do not have the same size image area as the film they replace, and consequently, the lens focal length is changed. But Sinar, for example, offer a set of view camera lenses specifically or digital photography, and there are battery-powered digital backs for medium and large-format cameras for location use and nature photography. In fact, these have been around for at least 5 years.
In short, never say never. I don't think Ansel ever did.
I mean, here's the answer, right here. Dude. Discussion over.
Or mount 196 synchronized cameras on some sort of apparatus. Or, a combination of the two methods would probably provide the best cost/effectiveness.
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
I recall reading about him working with a Scitex system in the 80's. It might have been him supervising the production of a book.
I just spent some time googling, but nothing came up. Anyone else remember reading about this?
I have a D100 and have been shooing with it for a year now and love it.
If you don't understand anything I post, please accept that I ate paste as a small boy...
That's the problem with scan backs. Several minutes for one exposure, and if anything moves, it's a wasted shot.
I used a few (~5) rolls of Kodak Tech Pan 25 for my final assignments in photo class...wow. Developing was a pain in the ass (and expensive, Technidol and two blown rolls aren't cheap), but the results were totally off the charts. Like...I couldn't use a grain focuser, even with the enlarger all the way up, because there was no perceptible grain. I got my hands on an extra-high enlarger (67xld IIRC) and printed up a couple of 8x10s that covered maybe 1/8 of the 35mm negative...still no grain. I hear you can make poster-sized (5') blowups from a full frame of TP that show about as much grain as an 8x10 from Delta 100...is digital anywhere near this level yet, at any price point?
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
if you read his BBS, he couldn't use those tools for such a large image. He used some as yet unreleased custom tools he coded himself. Smaller images can be assembled with those (and still be huge) but as far as the gigapixel behemoth goes, he had to use custom.
That being said my 2 megapixel nikon looks fine for 99% of my photography. For family albums I remember people, not their individual, high res pores, and for artwork grain isn not intrinsically bad.
Photos.
What is wrong with all of those example photos? They all display rich colours and almost NO use of light whatsoever. It's not all about quality - digital will never be able to capture light the way a film camera can. Film is a chemical process, very much affected by light. A CCD just simply can't capture light in the same way, get the same sense of exposure, and get the same effects. Ansel Adams loved to work with light, just look at his B&W work and you will see it's all about contrast. Unless you manipulate after taking a photo, digital can't achieve that kind of thing - especially in low-light situations!
"How can you possibly argue film is cheaper than that?"
"from there on out it's free, free, free."
But it isn't free free free. Have you thought about the batteries? They are consumables, just like film. Digitals still suck down the batteries like nothing else. Put in a rechargeable, you've just seriously limited your shooting time, or else you're going to have to spend lots of time recharging several sets.
That's either hundreds of non-reusable batteries over the life of the camera or a bunch of sets of rechargables, plus a charger... maybe two chargers if you want real flexibility on a vacation. You'll want to recharge two sets at night to shoot all the next day.
Also, you'll replace the flash card when you get a new camera because the new cam doesn't read the old format and anyway it's too small for the new higher-res photos... no "using it long after the camera has broken."
All that brings the maintenance on digitals pretty close to that on film. But with film, you get a better picture...
digital and traditional photography are two different things. Like oils and charcoals. People will debate this for eternity because they don't understand the difference.
Ansel loooooved fuckin with his pictures in the darkroom. So I think he would have liked the easy manipulation of photographs. I've always had a special place in my heart for getting it right in the camera...all my double expures are done in camera...never on the enlarger. He wasn't like that...so I think he would have loved how much he could manipulate the images on the computer. However I think what people have said about size is key. Digital isn't there yet in terms of pixels. I think Ansel would still be shooting with his large format today...but a few more years down the line he might have gone digital.
Maybe he didn't cut down tree's to get a shot but I know for a fact that his prof. assistant was mixing up selium toner over a hot stove with no protection, at the direction of AA. Would you enjoy selium vapors hitting you while the world proclaims your boss to be Mr. Enviormental?
actually, warhol was one of the first artists to experiment with digital artwork... it is doubtless he'd have been doing digital art.
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
The original poster was refering to an 8 inch by 10 inch digital back for the camera - not an 8x10 print.
I don't have a copy nearby to refresh my memory with, but toward the end of his autobiography I believe Adams stated something along the lines of that he was looking forward to the maturity of digital imaging technology.
I think Ansel Adams would have continued using film. Different films and processes have various non linear response artifacts. Exploiting these allows capture of photos that defy digital. The most obvious one is dynamic range, which the photographer can intimately control with film and process selection. The expanded range present at the toe and shoulder of the response curve may someday make it to digital, but for now don't be looking for a lot of detail in highlights and shadows.
Drum scanner : 8,000dpi resolution
8x10 image = 64,000 x 80,000 = 5 billion pixels.
So no. Not enough to beat it.
Plus an 8x10 would take me around 10min to take and 1 hour to process. Id hate to think how long it would take to capture 196 images and paste them together.
The problem he would have had would have bin in how to print his pictures. There are no printers that can match a good platinum photo paper. And even if you could get some kind of digital enlarger to do the printing process the gradation curve of digital images looks different from that of photographic films and the match between photographic paper and the digital negative would have bin much harder.
And mathing image, negative and print was what the zone system that ansel adamsn developed and used was good for.
So I suppose he would have used old fashioned photographic processes after all.
This is not to say that digital photography have no value. Most photographers doesn't have the time or assistants to produce the fine quality prints like Ansel Adams did for his exhibitions, and for them digigal photograpy is j
ust fine.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
Galen Rowell was a man who took much of Ansel Adams' work as inspiration in his photographs, and he saw the move to digital prints, but not to digital photography.
You just have to understand, a digital camera simply cannot produce anything of good quality larger than 8x10, even with 10 megapixels. Even with 50 there is a limit. The main digital innovation in the print photography world is the digital printing process; using lasers to acheieve perfect color and detail in prints of amazing size -- There are prints on the wall of Galen's gallery in Bishop that took my breath away when I saw them for the first time. I had simply never seen a photograph so large and so clear in my life. But was it taken digitally? No, of course not.
I don't think digital cameras will truly be taken seriously in pro photography until we can think of something better than a CCD or CMOS sensor to record the image. Maybe with the advent of nanotech we might be able to find a way to record true film digitally. Now that would be the best of both worlds.
"!"
Now, speculations about a deceased mans possible viewpoint on the digital technology is about the most important input any discussion can get
SLOGEN [ http://ungdomshus.nu : Sebastian cover music]
There is a strange and subtle distinction, in my mind... There is a sense in which the conventional photographic negative holds a physical trace of the actual "light event," if you will, that created it. The digital does not. As soon as those photons are converted to information all trace of the original physical event is lost. The light data becomes completely ephemeral, completely fungible. But in pragmatic reality this is pretty much a philosophical point. In the end the reliability of an image can only depend on documentation of method and faith in the source. The transition from film to digital doesn't change that.
Interesting. At one level I see your point. A digital camera slices and dices the physical event into a serialized set of pixels (its as if you took film and passed it through a carefully designed cross-cut paper shredder). This slicing and dicing emphasizes the fragility of the image -- one stray cosmic ray in RAM or a bit of dust on the disk's directory and the image is lost. A file on a harddisk seems so much less real than a developed frame of film.
At another level, digital is actually more objective than film at capturing that "light event." On the one hand, a CCD imager is like a geometrically regular array of little photon counters. The output of a digital camera represents a quantitative sample measurement of the photons that fell in each of those little geometrically arranged areas. On the other hand, film operates much more stochastically -- the random chances that enough photons all hit each randomly distributed film grain defines the chance of each grain developing (at least 3 or 4 photons must hit a grain to make it develop). Each grain is a stochastic event at a stochastic location. Only in the aggregate, with thousands of these randomly energized and developed grains, do we perceive the developed latent image. Looked at from this perspective, digital seems more real and film seems more capricious.
Ultimately, though, you are right. It is faith in the process that determines whether film or digital images are "real." Both can be manipulated.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Photography has always been at its core a technology driven medium. If you look at the history of photography people have regularly switched from older technologies to new - even if that meant inferior image quality (like the switch from daguerrotypes to the positive negative process developed by Talbot - it's still too early; I can't remember the name of the process).
So this notion that "traditional" darkroom-based photography is better (or more "artistic" than digital is absurd.
What matters is the image. Pure and simple.
The time he spent in the darkroom was all to
make the finished image on print look as close
to the "perfect" shot as possible from how he
saw it.
The man was a phenomenal artist and a wizard of
photography.
I take my hat off to him.
What we really need is a Beowulf cluster of low resolution cameras!
"All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
To say if Ansel Adams would have "gone" digital... I don't really understand where this question or statement is viable. We are talking a totally different generation of technology here. Ansel Adams was a large format guru, since, that was pretty much the best format for what he wanted to do at the peak of his career. 35mm cameras back in his day sucked. It wasnt until the late 70's did cameras start to have quartz controlled, electronic, shutters. What you say? Before this the timing of the shutters was done with spinning weights, magnets, clockwork type mechanisms, and strings routed on pulleys within the camera. Plus, lens technology wasnt where it was at today, the light metering wasn't too good. Not saying that there are no cameras with spot or center weighted meters anymore, but, the light sensors themselves were slow to react and inconsistant. So, he was using the best technology at the time for what he wanted to do. Now, to throw him into the "now" and give him the equivalant of what he had in digital. Who wouldn't go digital? Or, at the very least, go digital in means of image manipulation. I shoot slide film, and scan it in, do my manipulation in Photoshop, and print them out. I can see him doing that much. Also, I highly doubt, in 1981, that Ansel Adams told someone that if he were to do it again, he would have gone digital. I just don't see that. He died in 1984, about 2-3 years after Sony created their first Mavica. Which was like, what, 640x480 8 bit? MAYBE?! Probably 4-bit. Had a proprietary 2MB disk drive. I don't even think it was available commercially. Sony just made it as a prototype. Sony Mavica's were like 640x480, 8 bit color in the mid 90's. So, I severally doubt they were better when they first came out. ESPECIALLY considering the insane advancemnts in digital processing within the camera itself with the past 5 years alone. Hell, CCD, CMOS, JFET advancments for the imaging device itself have made huge improvements. Also, being old enough to remember technology the EARLY the 80's, I just don't see it. 1981? Come on man. PC's did not even come standard with a COLOR adapter. Yeah, we are talking that PC's displayed text and only text and being able to display 4 colors was like a $130 option. Having more than 640k of RAM was impressive. Maybe a 10MB HD? Not only was their a hardware limitation, there was a software limitation. Programs with the power of image manipulation like Photoshop or Gimp simply did not exist then at a consumer level or even pro level. Maybe at an animation studio using a Cray supercomputer? Which cost several million back then? Imagine doing what you do today with Photoshop on a 80186 8Mhz, 640KB RAM, and a 10MB scratch disk.
First off, 10MP in the pro digital arena is considered entry level, not high-end. Digital backs that do upwards of 16MP are common, though wildly expensive (15k or so, last I checked, here's a review).
If you take a good, low-noise 10MP camera, though, and shoot the same shot as a film camera, you're going to find that modern printers who have modern software scaling capabilities will give you 8x10 prints that are arguably better than you would get from film. Certainly no worse. The key is in the scaling techniques used. Film scaling has progressed over the decades from simple magnification to an imensely sophisticated process. Only recently have digitial scaling processes begun to become this sophisticated.
With capabilities like this, you would still need a great deal of work before, during and after shooting and patience along with it, to get a shot comparable to an Adams... interestingly, so did he.