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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.
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."
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.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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.
Tcl my Pico! There are 10 kinds of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't.
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.