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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."
Ansel Adams was above all a environmentalist, probally more so than a photographer. Do you know the kind of chemicals needed to make a roll of film into a negitive? Just the enviromental savings from the lack of processing would have given him a reason to use digital.
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
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
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.)
Ansel Adams was all about the integrity and subtlety of the medium. In his day, he railed against the use of resin-coated photographic papers (which he referred to as "plastic papers"), because they didn't produce an image with the same purity and subtlety as one printed on fibre based paper (as any photographer can tell you).
Everyone has seen Adams coffee table books, but one has only to stand in front of an actual Adams print to see that there is a quality to his prints that cannot be reproduced by even the highest quality methods of reproduction. Even if you're jaded by overexposure to Adams books and calendars (as I am), it is breathtaking to see his work in person.
Richard LoPinto is trying to sell digital SLRs for Nikon. Frankly, I think it is a disrespect for him to speculate that Adams would have anything to do with a digital camera, or any digital process.
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.
I think he would have gone digital.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
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.
For some unknown reason, I have the names of "Ansel Adams" and "Robert Mapplethorpe" mixed up in my head. I was braced for something a bit different when I clicked...
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
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...
"At great length?"
And while waiting for the perfect shot, he'd enjoy an cool, refreshing Coca-Cola(tm)!
Give me a break, people. This was a puff piece.
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.
Ansel spent countless hours in the darkroom to "manipulate" his pictures. THat included choosing print paper type, exposure time, dodging (making an area lighter or darker) and the list goes on and on. If he had had a digital camera to match the resolution of his film camera, he would probably have been overjoyed. However, it seems that neither Canon or Kodak with their 13 and 15 megapixel cameras have come close to the resolution of the large negative cameras, so Ansel would probably still be using film!
A quote from a recent PBS documentary:
...I don't know, half or forty percent of the creative process occurred in the darkroom...."
"He manipulated the work tremendously in the darkroom. He always said that the negative is the equivalent of the composer's score and the print is the equivalent of the conductor's performance, and the same piece of Mozart is conducted differently, performed differently, by different orchestras, different conductors, and Ansel performed his own negatives differently.
I could only imagine what Ansel Adams could do with Photoshop!
http://www.kubuntu.org/
Although, he would love the post processing ability of photoshop to manipulate faint details in a image, I think he would have been very unhappy about the limited dynamic range of digital.
I think he would have still used film for the contrast control not present in digital. Once digital cameras are developed with better contrast control he would begin to use them.
The Economics of Website Security
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.
I have no idea if Ansel Adams would have used digital, but I wouldn't go asking an officer of a camera manufacturer if Adams would have bought new equipment if I wanted an objective opinion. (Disclaimer: I didn't RTFA)
Ansel Adams is well known for large format very high resolution imagery; I doubut he would have achieved the same results with today's cutting edge equipment.
"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.
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."
He is dead. His work is art history now. Don't get me wrong, as a former photographer, a university level computer based art teacher, and large museum, I respect his work.
The simple truth is that he was a product of his time and that time was glass and emulsion. Yes thats right, glass. He started out shooting as someone who has hung Ansel Adams work in a photos on glass plates. Later he changed technologies and shot on the flexible film we all use today. Ultimately his time has past.
Were Ansel Adams alive today he might be creating art in code as many of us are doing now. He might be working with neural nets or a network of wifi nodes and location aware technology.
One might just as pointlessly ponder whether or not he would be producing Marxist institutional critique or gender based work.
To suggest that he would like digital photography is pointless. If he were alive today producing the same work he did in the 40's (no matter how beautiful) in any format we would say he was irrelevant and anachronistic.
Next up... Raphael loves Photoshop, Rembrandt digs Python and the Bauhaus goes over to OSX.
signifier-signified
www.34n118w.net
mining the urban landscape
For people currently learning to shoot, go with digital. It's a much better way to learn. My father (who used to teach at Nikon School) says he would have learned to shoot in 1/4 the time.
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.
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...
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.
It sounds like your answers is no then because no such camera is likely to exist for the forseeable future and building one from scratch would cost orders of magnitude more than a lifetime of sheet film even for someone like Adams.
50 megapixel would also be pretty grainy at the large prints adams liked to make. A 2 megapixel doing a 4x6 print would be the same resolution as a 50 megapixel doing a 20x30 print. 20x30 is a typical size for adams, and a 2 megapixel is just barely tolerable at 4x6.
The other side is creative control over the chemicals. We're talking about digital manipulation but analog manipulation has existed as long as chemical photography has. Ansel Adams was a master of that and I doubt he'd give up the techniques he spent a lifetime learning.
Besides the obvious darkroom stuff, film has interesting quirks. A 1 minute exposure is not 60 times effective as a 1 second exposure on real film. How will a CCD behave; in Adams style of photography, long exposures are common.
Jason
ProfQuotes
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.
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/
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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
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.