Ansel Adams spent a LOT of time in the darkroom.

[ConsAreLiars]

The quality of his images came about not only because of his "in camera" composition and technical skill and his initial vision, but also (mainly?) because of his intense effort to reproduce that initial vision with the absolute maximum of detail and subtlety that the film and paper would allow. A whole school of photography emerged that tried to teach others the lessons and techniques learned by this master of photography. Google "Zone system" for more on all that.

Unfortunately (or not) the kind of processing work Adams put into his art is still needed with digital photography. With digital cameras or even modern film cameras the various pre-programmed settings (landscape, portrait, action, white balance, auto-exposure, etc) present automated "processing" processing that attempts to yield the "best" output, and they usually do a good job, but even the most skilled (and unskilled) photographers may find that there is a lot more in some photos than a first look might reveal.

One site I found that reveals very clearly the before-and-after difference that digital processing can make is http://www.ncplus.net/~birchbay/tutorials/ . (Put the cursor over the pics for the "before" image.) I haven't tried the particular techniques this author describes, and there are undoubtedly similar sites where other software is used, but one is a reminder that what we first see with the photos we take may be far, far less than what is actually there. So if you take a picture that is a bit disappointing, that somehow seems to have lost something, there is a chance that you have the data in that file and that it can be recovered if you want to put in the effort.

Take a look, and add this bit of self-instruction somewhere on your "to do" list.

[alfredo]

1. Thanks for the link. I love working with large format. I had

a 120 reflex. There was a big difference in how big a print I could make and how much I can zoom in on a subject before losing quality.

[regnaD kciN]

2. "Darkroom"...? What's a "darkroom?"

:evilgrin:

Actually, when Adams talked about "large format," he didn't mean 120 film or even 4x5. A number of his best-known works were shot on 8x10 sheet film...thus, the prints you see from them weren't enlargements, but contact prints from a carefully-exposed and processed negative. No wonder there was so much visual detail and texture in his works.

[ConsAreLiars]

3. Actually

Adams was "The Compleat Photographer" as witnessed by his three-part series: "The Camera," The Negative," and "The Print" - see http://www.camerareview.com/templates/books.htm .

The part I wanted to emphasize was the third, where, after doing the best he could with the first two elements, he spent a lot of effort dodging, burning, masking, and otherwise tweaking the print into a form that represented his vision. Some "purists" called it cheating, since it went far beyond a contact print. Yet the information that he got onto the final print was there, in the negative, and he had to do this kind of processing in order to transfer it to paper.

The same is true today with digital pix or scans - there is often more in the raw data (negative) than a straight "contact print" will show without the kind of post-processing illustrated in the original link.

[NV Whino]

4. I agree

I got over "the camera is always right" syndrome and if the composition warrants it, I have been tweaking my digital photos to bring out the best. Always did it in the darkroom. Why not in the digital darkroom.

There was a fabulous Adams show in SF a few years back. One of the most outstanding pieces was the photo of the New Mexican village at night. I forget the name. There were three (I think) prints, maybe four. The first was his first presentation print, which he had enhanced in the darkroom. The others were prints made several years apart further enhancing the the print. It was a great lesson in what one can do with a fully balanced negative. I took the lesson to heart and went home to play with some good, but not spectacular prints. I kept pushing and pushing, and voila pushed them into excellent (if not spectacular) prints.

One of the things I almost always do on digital prints is go into "levels" and adjust the white and black in the histogram. That alone usually enhances the photo, whether it is black and white or color.

[Blue_In_AK]

5. I like playing with the "curves"...

Amazing what you can do with those things.

[GOPFighter]

6. I wonder what Ansel Adams would think of digital cameras...

...and Photoshop. Would he be excited by the addditional control or would he be scornful of the technology?

I'd like to think he'd be delighted by the additional tools at his command. I am!

[NV Whino]

7. I think he would be, too

An I suspect that Imogene Cunningham would kick ass. She was one fine lady.

[regnaD kciN]

8. I think he'd love the potential of the technology...

...but demand at least 30-40 MP for any camera he'd use. ;-)

[Blue_In_AK]

9. You mean like the $37,000 Hasselblad

I saw advertised in my photo magazine? Yikes!!

[F.Gordon]

10. Thanks for the dialog and the link

This is something that I've been very slow to come around to. I would think that I failed anytime I got a crappy "in-camera" snap. What probably convinced me the most to take this part of photography more seriously was reading through some old photo mags I have from 1941-1942.

I saw these "new" darkroom techniques being discussed and explained. They were probably thumbed down by the purists of the day but the point being.... the darkroom has always been a place to explore new ways to process and refine a photograph.





My biggest problem with going to the DARKroom side is learning to sloooow down.

[regnaD kciN]

11. An unrelated gripe...

I would think that I failed anytime I got a crappy "in-camera" snap.

A couple of months ago, a comic strip that ran in the local paper did a series where the dorky husband was experimenting with using software to "post-process" his digital photos. His more-sensible wife (the heroine of the strip, of course), who realized how ridiculous it was to think that computer software could improve a photograph, dismissed the idea as "G.I.G.O. - Garbage In, Garbage Out" (and, yes, they really bolded and underlined the letters each time, lest it be too subtle for the audience).

Every day that week followed a similar, depressing pattern: the dorky husband would try something new in the software and fail miserably, with the wife always present in the final frame to remind him "Garbage In, Garbage Out." In the final strip, the dorky husband finally conceded defeat: "You're right, honey. It really is 'Garbage In, Garbage Out'."

Nothing like spreading the notion among average digital camera owners that their photos can never look any better than they do "in-camera," and, if they don't look great in their raw state, it's because the photo (and the camera owner's ability, presumably) is garbage...oh, excuse me, I meant garbage. I wonder what would have happened if people we now consider great photographers of the last century had been likewise convinced that any darkroom manipulation would be pointless (or, if seemingly successful, fraudulent).

:grr:

[NashVegas]

12. When Does a Photograph Stop Being a Photograph?

And when it does, what's so horrible about acknowledging something as "graphic art" or "digital art" or "digital graphic" or what have you?

Simply because of how the word "photograph" is defined, I tend to be a purist. A recording of light. For my personal (and I do emphasize the personal) definition, I push it further - a recording of light in a specific instance of time.

At some point, a photo that has been pushed or enhanced to extremes stopped being a recording - how can you document something that never was? It's not like it's lesser art ..

[NV Whino]

13. I've taught a few classes here and there

And what I always start out with is this: There is no "wrong" in art. Applies to painting, photography, whatever.

[regnaD kciN]

14. Of course, there's a counter-argument to this...

...which I heard all-too-often in the 1970s: that "photography," as you define it above, can never be an art form because all it does is impartially record something, not transform it creatively (much as a CD cannot itself create music).

At least one of the benefits of the prevalence of Photoshopping is that I haven't heard that argument in years.

[NashVegas]

15. Not Necessarily Impartial

Otherwise, there would be zero variation between Subject A as taken by two different photographers.

CDs are an interesting comparison:

CDs don't create music but recording engineers create recordings that can succeed or fail (both financially and creatively) depending on an engineer's skills and creativity in things such as mic placement and room acoustics. They have science to train them but in the end, it's what they hear in their ears, what sounds good to them that guides their decisions.

Producers sometimes assist in the creation of the music, sometimes they sit back and allow themselves to be little more than a glorified engineer. The more heavy-handed the production, interestingly enough, the more likely the recorded document can be "dated" to a fairly narrow window of time to what production methods are popular.

The most basic Photoshopping methods - cropping, light enhancement, etc. - aren't that much of an encroachment. It's when you get into manipulating photos to portray something that never existed at any time, it's stopped being a recording. That doesn't make it less an art, nor does it make taking a great photograph less than art.

[regnaD kciN]

17. True, but...

CDs don't create music but recording engineers create recordings that can succeed or fail (both financially and creatively) depending on an engineer's skills and creativity in things such as mic placement and room acoustics. They have science to train them but in the end, it's what they hear in their ears, what sounds good to them that guides their decisions.

...I suspect that few people would consider a recording engineer to be an artist (although recording engineers probably would ;-) ). I think that most people would consider the performers to be artists, the engineer merely a talented technician (and the producer, of course simply a supervisor).

I'm not saying that this evaluation would be correct, but I'm pretty confident it's the "conventional wisdom."

[NashVegas]

18. Wanna Take This Up in the Music Forum?

Huh? huh?

:)

[Ms. Toad]

16. I have no problem with calling a

processed photograph digital art, or multimedia, or whatever other label is appropriate.

I don't buy that the transformation occurs at the point of post "recording of light" processing.

Were I a purist (I'm not), I would have to label "graphic art" any image that was produced by a camera more sophisticated than my first camera (which looked something like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinhole_camera ).

Once I select a particular f-stop because it gives me the depth of field I want I am no longer purely recording light, for example. Same goes (even more obviously) for wide angle lenses, macro lenses, filters, etc.

On the other end of the process, when I develop a photograph, even when I attempt to solely present the light recorded there is a fair amount of subjective assessment of when it is processed to that point. If I accidentally over expose or underexpose the print (and it looks better than the original) is it no longer a photograph? I haven't done color darkroom work, but I suspect there is even more processing variation there than there is with black and white.

I can't wrap my mind around the concept that the shallow depth of field which was created in the camera by selecting an appropriate F-stop is any more a true recording of light than the shallow depth of field I create in the digital darkroom.

My own line between a photograph and digital art (which I certainly don't consider lesser art) is when I use my electronic darkroom to accomplish things I could not have accomplished in a traditional darkroom. That permits quite a bit of both in camera and out of camera "processing" before I consider my piece of art something other than a photograph.

(Sorry - I can't help myself. I play with patents for a living and a big part of understanding patents is envisioning moving the boundaries of the box and understanding when the essence of "box" leaves and it becomes something essentially "not box.")

[ConsAreLiars]

19. I don't think that is asking a real question.

To me it is a question of honesty. The images posted by F. Gordon use the tools of photography to create images that are interesting, but nobody is being deceived into believing that they represent what a normal pair of eyes would see if they had been present at the time and place the shutter was snapped. That is altogether different than adding an image of Jane Fonda to a John Kerry pic or removing Berea from a Stalin pic and passing of the revised image as documentary photography.

Traditional photography has always had schools where "extreme" processing was used to create images that make no claim to being "recordings," but they are still forms of photography - solarizing, hand coloring, montages, messing with polaroids, just about anything anyone could imagine doing.

The only problem I see is when some significant alterations are made and the viewer is deceived into thinking that the image has not been altered and truly represents.

The examples I linked to in the original post, and Ansel Adams own work as well, are examples of where the "unprocessed" image showed much less than what the photographers eye saw in the scene and the film/sensor actually captured because of the limitations of standard processing. It is why pros don't get their gallery prints made at the nearest drugstore.

The main point, of course, was that there is often a lot more of what you "saw" in the scene you photographed than the drugstore print (auto-processed) image might reveal.