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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.
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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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.
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.
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/
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
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