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 p.2 #8 · from a photograph to an image | |
gdanmitchell wrote:
Ansel "manipulated" his prints as much or more than the typical photographer today who uses digital media.
One of his most famous Sierra photographs is "Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada, from Lone Pine." The black (because he made it black in post) hill in the middle ground features the large white letters "LP," put there by the students at the local Lone Pine high school. He burned down the letters dramatically in film post-production to essentially make them invisible, though they are visible in some prints. (You can read more about it here, among other places.)
Perhaps his most famous print is "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico." This photograph was radically manipulated to produce the print with which we are familiar. The original negative has very low contrast and is largely intermediate gray tones, not the stark blacks and whites of the print. Adams burned the sky WAY down from the original, in the process "disappearing" a bunch of clouds that were in the upper sky. As he did this he dodged the heck out of the famous band of "white" (formerly gray) clouds on the horizon, and he darkened the foreground a great deal. (You can see a before and after example here.)
Another well-known Adams print is "Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake, Denali National Park, Alaska." Over the years he continuously revised his interpretation o this print. (He actually did that with a lot of his prints, sometimes radically altering them.) Eventually he made it much more stark, with more areas that were extremely white or extremely dark, increasing the viewers focus on the graphical quality of the large areas in the scene more than on small details. (Years ago I saw an exhibit at a museum in Anchorage that tracked the evolution and reinterpretation of this print over time.)
His manipulations went beyond the darkroom printing work. For example, with some darker subjects (or certain high dynamic range situations) he would pre-expose negatives to a bit of uniform light in order otherwise insure some density in the negative even in the areas of darkness in the subject. Those notes you mentioned were often to remind him of how to process the negatives to deal with highlights, shadows, and dynamic range.
Adams was not at all shy about copping to his reliance on post production. In fact, he wrote several books about his techniques. From what I know (from personal conversations with some of his students/assistants and from reading) he would likely have been enthusiastic about the control that digital photography media give to us. (One of his proteges who is a friend even refers to some of the curves adjustments that we often use today as "the thing Ansel wasn't able to do," with the clear implication that he would have if he could have.)
Would he have actually added elements to construct a scene that did not exist? Not sure, For that you might want to investigate the highly-regarded work of Jerry Uelsmann...
The idea that there are bright, clear lines between something called "photography" and something called "images" isn't supported by how actual photography has worked for nearly 200 years. We each come to our own personal accommodation with this reality.
One wildlife photographer that I "know" (third hand via a photographer friend who shoots with them) wins all kinds of important wildlife photography awards... and as a standard practice adds backgrounds to their remarkable photographs of birds. (I'm not mentioning a name here.)
Might as well inject a bit of photography history into this train wreck of a thread... ;-)...Show more →
Dan, thank you for the insightful and interesting story!
This aligns with my understanding of photography art as a process of realizing an inner personal vision of the photographer.
Your mention of an award-winning photographer who (apparently) presented bird pictures with replaced backgrounds brings back the vague suspicion that I have - that this form of image manipulation might be more likely encountered in the work of bird and wild-life photographers. I might be wrong, but wouldn't be surprised if major content replacements (such the entire background or sky replacements) are less common among street and landscape photographers. I might be wrong, of course, but I still suspect that average bird pictures (that is 99% of all bird pictures taken in general) are not particularly interesting-looking, especially when presented in bulk, to outsiders. How many photos of eagles, owls, hummingbirds, etc. one is willing to see when shown one after another? My limit is rather short - I can tolerate 2-3, certainly no more that 5. Thus, there might be a strong incentive to improve the visual effects by adding a striking background or an impressive vivid colorful sky to compensate for the repetitive nature of the "central" subject..
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