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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."
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
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.
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.
Really? Are you sure you don't mean John Muir?
Adams used to set up his camera on the hood or roof of his BIG Cadillac (I realize that an 8x10 system weighs alot, but c'mon). But I think painting Adams as environmentalist is a bit of a stretch.
Ansel Adams was above all an artist.
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.
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.
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
Actually, Adams did live into the start of the digital imaging. In my copy of "The Print" (the last book to be updated I believe) he mentions the upcoming digital darkroom, and how he hoped to get a chance to work with it.
Adams was a very good artist, but a consumate craftsman and did much to advance the science of B&W image making. Some of his prints (Prints he made) don't do much for me as far as subject, but in his hands were executed to printing's highest art. He's often quoted as saying that the negative was the music score, but the print was the played symphony. He also wasn't above tweaking the print. "Moonrise over Hernadez" was printed differently throughout his career.
He eschewed resin papers because they looked terrible (they did) and weren't archival. Much of that has changed since his passing.
what adams' craft was about was that the photograper had total knowledge of the image process from shutter to print. How he got there changed a bit even during his lifespan (8x10 glass plates to 120 roll film and a hassie). If he was alive know, I'd expect him to be working with the ccd manufacturers to understand the precise response curves, Adobe and Sony to fully understand the new darkroom, and Epson and HP for ink pigments and how they interacted with papers
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."
Given the amount of work Ansel Adams spent composing his shots, combined with the fact that a large number were of landscapes, especially Yosemite I don't think the resolution of digital would have been a problem. Far from it in fact. I think he'd have simply taken to heart the technique of compositing multiple digital images like this (which, co-incidentally is 1 gigapixel). He'd have then gone on to turn the technique into an artform and written another volume of his seminal book series on the matter.
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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...
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.)
I'll just say that a true professional uses whatever tools are most appropriate for the job. If it's digital, it's digital. If it's analog, it's analog. Different photographers (or professionals in any field, really) do get used to working a certain way, and learn various tricks and techniques that they fear won't transfer over to a new medium, but it just then becomes a case where the advantages need to outweigh the hardship involved in learning a new system.
I don't think any true pro like Ansel Adams would be blindly loyal to one camera format or another (and that's all digital is; just another format in the grand scheme of things). If he didn't want to change, it wouldn't be because he was some sort of "die-hard" that refused to embrace new technology. It would only be because he didn't believe the advantages in the new format (convenience, ease of use, lightness of the equipment - which can be a big deal to a pro photographer) yet outweighed the disadvantages (lower resolution, lower sensitivity, less accurate color reproduction) or the difficulty in learning how to do the things you know how to do in one format on another.
In other words, it would only be because he felt that digital had not yet reached the quality of film - which is still true. But as digital improves, it's catching up fairly rapidly, and eventually I think he would have made the switch as will most current pros. I would bet that most pro landscape photographers already carry around a little point and shoot digital camera when they are not on formal shoots - as small and light as digital cameras are these days, and as good as the quality's getting, there's really no reason for a true photographer to ever be without one anymore. You never know when a great shot is going to present itself, and you're not always going to have your large-format film camera with you to capture it.
(Of course, a point and shoot film camera is just as small and light, but I do think in that segment of the market digital really pretty much has gotten to the point where the convenience eclipses any lingering resolution or color accuracy issues, and I think a lot of photographers are starting to realize that. A 5 megapixel point and shoot is good enough for the purposes of capturing quick shots that you'd otherwise miss, and with no worrying about running out of film or whether you actually got the shot afterwards.)
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.
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 however is clearly worth when photographing static objects, since it has increadible clarity. You can conversely do this with digital cameras as well.
Having chemical controls vs. access to level, saturation and brightness is almost the same. He could have mastered the digital techinques easily. Think about it, the whole thing is really not about how you achieve your goal, but what your goal is (in aesthetic sense).
Other thing: 50 megapixel monochrome is 150 megapixel color (as in digital photography each they count photo-sensors as pixels regardless of color, unlike in LCDs, where they count groups of different color photo-emitting diodes as pixels.) and 6 megapixels are way more than enough for 4x6 printed.
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UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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!
Mod the parent up. Its a very, very good point.
Ansel Adams would not use digital in its current form for any of his work. Ansel did use 8x10" large format for most of his career, but later in life when he could no longer hike with his 8x10" view camera and enormous surveyors tripod, he used 6x6cm Hassleblad systems.
There are many other advantages to using sheet film above and beyond the incredible resolution it provides. If you've ever read his book, "The Negative", you would see that much of his workflow depended on using sheet film. The "zone system", which he developed, only fully applies to B&W Sheet film emulsions. This involves shooting mutliple sheets of film at the same exposure setting, and developing each one differently to control contrast (N+1, N-1, etc) - see Chapter 10 of "The Negative."
Also, the dynamic range of B&W emulsions is worlds beyond what *any* digital capture can currently achieve. Ansel's books discuss capturing, in the final print, 11 different zones of tonality (Zones 0-10). Sorry, digital simply cannot do that. Period. It is a fact of physics that cannot be disputed.
This was the main reason why Ansel never did much with color (he dabbled with Kodachrome in the 1940s but didn't like the lack of tonal control it gave you - something slide film shares with digital, only digital suffers from it more severely).
Of course, all of this ignores the use of view camera movements that Ansel employed (tilt, shift, rise, draw, etc). Correcting perspective with the lens is no match for what can be done in Photoshop, since the latter method forces you to sacrafice resolution.
I'm not anti-digital by any means. It is indeed at the point of matching 35mm quality-wise, if not pricewise in the next few years (the one digital SLR that truly matches most film is the Canon 10Ds, which will set you back about 8 thousand dollars). However, to suggest that Ansel, who worked with large format B&W, would be using digital today only expressed incredible ignorance of B&W vs Digital issues, Ansel Adams' exacting standards, or more likely both. Dismiss it as marketoid speech.
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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.
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- JRR Tolkien.
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.
Well, most people who shot 5-10 rolls a year with their classic camera, tend to shoot 500-1000 pictures (ie. 25-50 rolls) of digital pictures, and then throw 30-60% away for bad lighting, exposure, saturation, etc. I've seen it happening.
How does a CCD react to a long (several minutes) exposure? Does the charge bleed off and it behaves sort of like film?
Yes it does, you can overexpose digital pictures, and it is really bad. I have done it by framing sunsets a little too early. Does not tend to damage the sensor, but the picture is sure ruined. But with tiny aperture you can sure have 5-10 minute exposures, it behaves just like the film in that sense (probably the curves are different, I mean the light vs. overexpose-ness), but it can be controlled.
The simple cheap box is really not that simple, or cheap. I've seen used 8x10 for around 7000 USD. The lens has to be incredibly good quality not to interfere with the very high resolution of the large format films.
And about digital push: I think it is more appropriate to say digital pull! It is consumerism that drives this, all these people want to get digital cameras (#1 most wanted gift this season).
While I know about a lot of limitations of digitals (because I am interesed in it), I think around 10-12MP (1-2 years) is where we are getting into true film quality for most everybody's needs. Professionals need to wait for 50-100MP (5-10 years) to really get film equivalent. Even after this there will be people (and they are much needed, and appreciated) who will use the 35mm and the 8x10 films, just for the hack of it...
After all, there are still LPs pressed nowadays, (check out Thievery Corporation's at eslmusic.com) and without them the world would be a (slightly) more boring place.
Code poet, espresso fiend, starter upper.
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.
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.
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