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."

Comments

My uncle studied under Adams

[Hayzeus]

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).

Ansel was a scientist.

[odenshaw]

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.

Re:Ansel was a scientist.

[sakusha]

Since I have a BFA in Photography, I'm probably the only person on Slashdot to have actually DONE *all* the exercises in the Adams books, and I assure you, you have completely missed the point.
Adams' books were NOT about the technology of the process. Technology was completely secondary to the issue. Adams was primarily interested in "previsualization." You see a scene you'd like to photograph, you previsiualize how you want the picture to turn out, and only THEN do you consider what technology (i.e. what lens & settings, what film speed, what developing) is necessary to produce the image you've previsualized.

Adams' darkroom == analog photoshop

[G4from128k]

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.

Re:Anyone ever talk to Ansel Adams?

[Zocalo]

Yes! I've been trying to find this quote for a while, but it wasn't in the book I thought it was. The following quote is by Leo Laporte in the forward of "Shooting Digital" by Mikkel Aaland:

Mikkel Aaland has worked as an itinerant photographer, making pictures much as his 19th century counterparts must have, in a makeshift studio-on-wheels, capturing images of anyone with a few dollars to spare. After nine years on the road, the result was his 1981 book, "Country Fair Portraits".

Shortly thereafter, another legend, Ansel Adams, told Mikkel that if he were beginning all over again he'd be shooting digital. Mikkel took the great man at his word and became one of the first to use, and write about digital photography.

It's an anecdotal quote, but 1981 is a big year for digital photography as it's when Sony released its first "Mavica", probably the first mass-market digital camera. I'd say that Ansel saw the potential in the technology even then, assuming of course he hadn't already encountered digital imagery from early recon satellites, the SR71 and so on.

Re:Prints

[Racine]

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.