In Jan of 2015 my wife and found the spot where Ansel took Moonrise Over Hernandez. It was a rush.
If I remember right, that one was shot with 8x10. He had mounted a piece of plywood on top of his old station wagon/car and used that as a platform to shoot from. I saw a photo of that once. It inspired me to attach some 2x4 boards to the roof rack of my Toyota RAV4 and take shots that got me above the crowd.
There is actually a wild story that he told about making the photograph. Supposedly he and an assistant (?) were driving when he spotted this scene. (It looked quite different then.) He scrambled out of the car and set up as the light was about to go and, by the seat of his pants, basically guessed (an educated guess, though) the exposure based on the value of the moon. He made an exposure, and was going to make a second but the light was gone.
The big take-away for me from the story is that it is yet another example of working quickly and intuitively, and being able to do so based on lots of practice and knowing the work and the gear very well, all the way through the process to the print.
Speaking of prints, the contact print of this negative (available online if you look around a bit) is terribly boring. It looks almost nothing like the famous and very successful print that he ended up with, in its many variations. The final print is the result of substantial post processing — bringing the sky down to near black, in some images removing clouds, dodging the distant ridge, and more.
It was Adams' firm belief, as it is the belief of most photographers still, that the creation of a print involves a whole sequence of steps at which vision, craft, and interpretation were to be applied. In no way was he going to "fix it in post," any more than a photographer today who exposes with a knowledge of how the image will work in post-processing is making an error that will need "fixing." He was quite articulate about this — we are all familiar with the remark about the negative being the score and the print the performance.
Dan
Dec 23, 2016 at 12:47 PM
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