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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."
Yeah, uhm, Nikon.com and Canon.com would be good places to start.
From $900 to about $10k you can get a SLR digital camera. I've had my Canon D60 since March of 2002, it was $2199 when I bought it.
6MP, and uses Canon's entire EOS line of lenses.
Nikon has the D100 which is the D60's equiv, (now replaced by the 10D) and then th D1's from Nikon and 1D's (several models depending on your needs)
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
absolutly incorrect. His landscape work was in B&W, but he did commericial color work
Charlie Chaplan hated talkies because he had a terrible stage voice. He knew that synchronized sound was going to be the end of his film career. All the talk about "appropriate art form" was a smoke screen.
I read the internet for the articles.
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...
Compare this to the chemicals used to produce the sensor in a digital camera. Just a tiny bit of hydroflouric acid will do more damage to the environment than the silver from all the film you'll probably ever use.
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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.
Exactly! Ansel was about the highest quality possible. He shot onto 8X10 film, and developed a whole system on how to print his pictures (The zone system). The ONLY way he'd go digital is if he had a 720MP (8X10 image @ 300dpi) camera back...and last I checked, they don't even come close to that.
"Would Ansel Adams Have Gone Digital?"
Of course not. He didn't even go color.
Wrong-o. Ansel Adams did much of his commercial work in color and even has a book of his color landscapes available on Amazon
Ansel Adams in Color, ISBN 0821219804, Bulfinch Press 1993.
Here's
a color landscape that's on the cover of that very book.
The quailty of black and white polaroid 4x5 is superb, and the negatives you could make from the product that produced a negative could be used to make high quality prints. This is why he used these products; they were and are of the highest quality; the coating to preserve the prints doesnt have an effect, if it is applied correctly.
Adams was also a careful archivist. He would have been, at the very least, concerned about preserving his work (the negatives or thier equivalent) for the future which as we all know, is a problem of digitally stored works.
He would have cautiously experimented with it, I think.
Edward Weston on the other hand, burned his negatives when he wanted to "clean out"; he would have gone digital for sure.
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I think Ansel Adams would not have said no to a 8x10 monochrome digital backpanel. Think in the range of 40-60 Magepixel. It is way, way beyond even ISO 50 films. Absolute lack of film grain, and because of monochrome, it would even lack interpolation artifacts.
Having monchrome would eliminate the need of heavy image processing, like interpolation: getting RGB pixels for each pixel which is either R, G or B. In fact, thinking about it, I cannot wait to be able to buy digital SLR with monochrome backs...
Code poet, espresso fiend, starter upper.
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.
Jesus H. Christ. I'm so sick of you "Its commercial so of course its wrong, why no, I didn't read the article" types. The Nikon rep, ACTUALLY MET Adams. He ACUTALLY WORKED WITH Adams for Nikon. He most likely has heard quite an earful on what Adams wanted and expected out of a camera. A guy who had to work to satisfy the camera demands of an artist like Adams just might be a good source to pose this completely hypothetical question. As opposed to an art professor who has vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
If someday digital can match the dynamic range and resolution of silver prints, then I may reconsider. Until then, Luddites Unite!
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.
I own a D100, and while still a neophyte digital SLR user, even I know it's not capable of capturing the detail that Ansel Adams was capable of capturing with film. On the other hand, Nikon has pro cameras currently available and pro-sumer cameras in the hopper that approach the capabilities that Adams would have required. Within a few years, I suspect it will be the norm for digital cameras to easily compete with film. To suggest Ansel Adams would prefer a D100 over say a D2H for example, is like suggesting that Chuck Yeager would have preferred the Concorde over the SR-71.
Anyways, semiconductor process chemicals are treated (at least in Europe / North America, and they're getting better than they used to be in India, Taiwan, etc). HF is easily neutralized. Look at the environmental permitting at Intel's fab 12 in Arizona - waste discharge is a huge issue; they don't just dump HF out a pipe. Once neutralized, fluoride salts are about as toxic as toothpaste (toothpaste is approx 0.243% NaF, which is nasty stuff).
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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/
Yes, XTOL is based on vitamin-C as a developing agent.
The reason Adams like HC-110 at very high dilutions is that it reduces the solvent effect during development resulting in high acutance and therefore very sharp negatives. This will also increase grain, but since he was shooting large format, the grain isn't much of an issue.
pyro is really nasty stuff, but can produce wonderful negatives. Edward Weston was a big user of pyro developers and it is believe that they contributed significant to his parkinson's disease.
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Check out the new Rebel Digital. 6mp, body is $899, accepts all EOS lenses.
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
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Sophie
I'm not to say that digital is not here and is not high quality - I'd nearly die for a digital SLR; I am saying that somebody who believes he'd adopt digital photography anywhere near the form of what it is today does not understand the topic.
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Yes, long exposure is Adams signature style, that is because he used tiny apertures, and the light came through such a tiny hole, that it needed a good long time to make the impression on the film.
This is exactly why I said long exposures are common in Adams style of photography. Small arperture means larger depth of field, and for landscape you want the DoF to be maximized.
My point is that film has an inverse saturation curve that is somewhat unique for each kind of film. Adams was skilled to the point where he had an intuitive feel for how the films he used would react. How does a CCD react to a long (several minutes) exposure? Does the charge bleed off and it behaves sort of like film? Does it bleed into other pixels and fog the whole image? Is it perfectly stable and a 10 minute exposure is a 5 minute exposure + 1EV?
If even you're right about the pixel count (and I tend to believe you because of lack of trust of the hardware makers), you're only arguing that this special 50MP camera would be as good as Adams sheet film. Where is the advantage? Why should he abandon a simple (cheap) box that costs a few dollars (today's value) per exposure in favour of something that is arguable just as good, but costs more than he made in his lifetime? It's not like he needed to take lots of shots; his pictuers were well planned out and took a long time to take each one.
Maybe the digital would have made him take lots more pictures and spend less time on each. Then instead of hundreds of truly great works of art, he might have taken tens of thousands of mediocre snapshots.
I really don't understand this digital push. It's good for photojournalists who care more about getting the picture to their publisher as fast as possible than image quality or whether the picture will be useful in 50 years. It's also good for people learning to take pictures so they can get some instant feedback and take lots of pictures to experiment.
But for most people film is still better. A typical person who shoots 5-10 rolls a year on vacations and at parties will find that digital has a much higher per-shot cost over the lifetime of the camera; a $300 digital gives comperable features and feel to a $30 P&S film camera. At 5-10 rolls/year you will never recoup those costs over the life of the camera.
As far as quality, you might argue that a $3000 digital is comparable to film, but the $300 digital is definately inferior to film. So for the typical person, digital costs more per shot and gives inferior quality. Where is the advantage?
Jason
ProfQuotes
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?"
I really don't understand this digital push. It's good for photojournalists who care more about getting the picture to their publisher as fast as possible than image quality or whether the picture will be useful in 50 years.
I really think this is a key point with respect to whether Adams would have used digital. One of the (many) things he was concerned with was the archival nature of both the negative and the print. I think he would not have bought into the "just copy your bit image to whatever new medium exists 5 years down the road" requirement that digital has. He worked closely with the film & paper manufacturers (Kodak, mostly) - perhaps today he would work with the folks in the computer industry & push for a truly archival digital medium that could be used to store images.
All modern telescopes switched to solid state detectors for imaging. That's you who does not know what he is talking about.
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What a pity everyone looks at Adams' pictures but few read his words. Most of us would profit from emulating his stately, elegant prose style and might learn a thing or two about photography as well. I quote from his introduction of volume two "The Negative" from his "The New Ansel Adams Photography Series" 1981, wherein he states "I eagerly await new concepts and processes. I believe that the electronic image will be the next major advance. Such systems will have their own inherent and inescapable structural characteristics, and the artist and functional practitioner will again strive to comprehend and control them." Proof that Adams would have devoted much time and attention to creating images via digital media. Back when it mattered to me personally, I claimed that when pixel density approached grain density in conventional film the debate would end. In retropspect I was being very pessimistic. With present day edge detection alogrithms in software pixel density need not be anywhere close to grain density to produce equal image quality.