Ansel Adams BBC Master Photographers (1983) 2005pm 2.4.22 i wasn't impressed to begin with... but that was, perhaps, how his oeuvre was presented tome.. or the obvious notions regards preserving the ecology of the globe...a tedious trend folk are now following - tedious in that they really have no care for such subject matter. i saw his work exhibited in london. the large 5ft images were pretty awe inspiring... p.s he has a look-a-like living in accrington... or did.
Holy crap I am a photo purist and an Ansel disciple. I have never seen this interview and am blown away. He predicted the digital trend in 1983 and embraced it!!! I have to wonder if it would have disappointed him in the long run, as it has me. After 35 years shooting film, I am still a daily film shooter in large, medium and small formats. Film forever my people!!!!
He would have cherished it for possibilities that digital photography would have presented the photographer, and at the same time horrified at some of the nonsense that is propagated as digital photography.
Great teacher...his books the Camera, the Negative, the Print and the Polaroid are essential for those interested in large format work...also a pioneer in land conservation and National Parks in the US. Good Man.
I absolutely love Ansel. He's a huge inspiration to me these days when I take landscapes in England although I could never be a fraction as good as he was, he was a total master and American legend. So many great artists came out of the US at this time.
I didn't know that he was still alive in 1983. He was such an iconic figure in photography that I figured that he must have passed away in the 30s or 40s. In photography and art classes they always seem to talk about him in the past. I'm glad I saw this. Very inspirational.
mr adams a master of his craft.a wonderful old soul i had a chance to see him with the fellow members of friends of photography in carmel calif.you must see his art in person.
I saw his exhibition in London back in the early 90s. The emotions that looking at his photographs invoked in me brought tears to my eyes. Such was the impact of his photography. Yes you are 100% correct, unless people see his prints in person, they may not appreciate what he did and how extraordinarily well he did.
andy sheader looking at his pictures also creates in your mind a peaceful and almost spiritual experience viewing his work, beautiful to know his work exists considering that there is so visual rubbish out there...
Ansel was so talented, yet so humble. I could listen to interviews like this for hours to learn and better understand his views about the craft. It's too bad we don't have more of these types of free form interviews to get insight into Ansel's experiences over the years.
Adams was a normal camera nerd in that he was interested in the latest film stock, lenses, darkroom equipment - he liked to be up-to-date and not stick with the same gear out of habit.
Grant The problem is the social media mindset, not digital photography. Digital is the greatest tool we have ever had, and now anyone can take photos like this if they try.
Ansel Adams BBC Master Photographers (1983) 2019pm 2.4.22 i am still bemused by why people think it an amazing insight that folk can make the same image convey a different sense of being... it comes down to dodging and burning yer image in the dark room: "different performances" as it were. why is that seen as such a major innovation?
"The best picture is around the corner, just like prosperity". What an enjoyable interview. It was interesting to hear his ideas about the similarities and differences between photography and music as well as painting. A great artist and educator. Thanks for posting. Y
Thank you, Adams, for paraphrasing well the reason why I came to watch your video as a non-photographer, that all forms of art carry the same principle of creativity! Bravo, fortissimo yaaaa
This man has been editing his images even before many of us heard of Photoshop. I guess this puts a damper on those who believe "pure photography" means shooting without manipulating their photos.
@@IgnacioAlvarez Digital photos need to be edited in the same way people edit photos in the darkroom. Of course, it's different, but the basics are the same. Dodging, burning, contrast and exposure are the first things that John and Thomas Knoll (creators of photoshop) would have implemented. So no, he's right.
@@IgnacioAlvarez Don't get mad at him. A lot of people particularly the ' digital ' generation just do not understand the concept of visualization. The damage that digital has and is doing to fine art photography as a craft is beyond most people's understanding.
What I forgot to say in my last comment, that making a black and white photograph in the darkroon, you select the paper, which involves the image tone and paper surface, the different types of chemicals and how they effect the way the image appears, the rich velvity black tones, the mid-tones, etc.
Ansel Adams is indeed a great photographer. He understands the craft . I've always liked black and white, because it's not just taking a picture, it's making a photograph. I'm sure Mr. Adams will agree, that weather you're using digital or a large format film camera, you need to know the craft. Sometimes you're going to set your camera on totally automatic and auto-focus.....and click. Then there are times when you're going to use a large format film camera like Adams and meter here and meter there, and set your camera this way and that way....you're making a photograph. Did you know that Adams also took pictures in color as well? That's what I read somewhere. But I've never seen any of the color prints. If you love photography, then you love everything about it.
Great artists have great vision. He was obviously very excited by the possibilities that digital ( or as he called it electronic ) photography could bring, although I am not sure he would have approved of all this ' AI powered ' manipulation that has become so popular with digital photography these days. A step too far perhaps.
Henri Cartier-Bresson. The master street photographer who coined the phrase 'The Decisive Moment'. As Ansel says, he was the master of anticipating this.
would you use each roll to expose for a certain lighting condition or how how would yo implement the system? Also as it is not real black and white film, is it worth implementing with this type of film?
+Socrates I know this is a year old, but I figured I would post a reply for anyone who may be wondering the answer to your question. The zone system was really developed for large format, as each sheet of film is exposed individually and can thus be developed individually. The zone system relies on careful spot metering of the high and low values, and then assigning a developing time +/- from normal. Technically, it is possible to use the zone system with roll films, but it really only will work if you are going to stay in an area with consistent ambient lighting, as your high/low values will change dramatically if going from full sun to shade to overcast, and one development scheme isn't going to seal the deal. C-41 film is highly unorthodox for this practice because, assuming standard exposure, C-41 uses the same time and temperature for all brands and speeds of film. You will get pretty crappy results if you try to alter that other than pushing or pulling by a few stops.
@Savanna Hennig. That's not entirely accurate. Pushing or pulling the negative in the developing stage is only meant to correct for imperfect or problematic exposure. Say if you underexposed the negative by a stop, either by accident or because you didn't have enough light. In the developing stage, you would then push the film (or rather overdevelop) to compensate for the underexposure. Now, the zone system is the designed to help the photographer only in terms of black and white dark room printing ie., your exposure time in the darkroom to achieve a specific value and contrast range in the print. So if your negative was correctly exposed, there is no need to push or pull the film in the development. The zone system can be perfectly applied: the exposure time of the area in the print will determine the value of that area and the developing time in the print developer will determine the contrast. Color photography and scanning the negative to digital is something entirely different and I am not sure how one would apply the zone system.
+Zhida Zhou every single photographer retouches a photo, A camera can't take the image you see with your eyes, it just can't, Retouching isn't cheating, it's correcting the camera, However Photoshopping something in is cheating
I never said that retouching was cheating. I probably know more about dynamic range then you. The thing with Ansel is that he wasn't as much of a photographer as he was a retoucher. Did you not listen to the interview?
+NZpnw I think he'd be delighted. He stated in this interview that he thought the electronic medium was a delightful thing. He spent hours and hours manipulating some of his images. Some of them he manipulated in multiple ways over time, so I think he'd absolutely love Photoshop, Lightroom, and Darktable types of software. He was an artist who was open to multiple mediums of expression, as his constant references to music indicated well.
According to a previous comment: "Henri Cartier-Bresson. The master street photographer who coined the phrase 'The Decisive Moment'. As Ansel says, he was the master of anticipating this.
Henri Cartier Bresson. He was a French photographer who literally invented candid scene photography. What today is called street photography, sadly. His acute sense of anticipation of the moment, gave rise to the phrase ' The Decisive Moment '. He mostly shot with a Leica and a 50mm lens.
I really love many of Ansel Adam's pictures, he is one of the very few really great landscape photographers in my opinion. But I honestly never understood the - for lack of a better word - hype for 'Moonrise over Hernandez'. Admitted, it is a good picture; I - being a mediocre hobby picture taker myself - would be proud, if I could say that I made this photo, but compared with the general quality of his work in the Sierra Nevada and Yosemite, it does not even come close to the pictures I would consider AA's best work.
T Latz I disagree, but not to start an arguement. It is definetly one of my favorites (to be honest though, there a lot that I would consider my favorites).
+T Latz Part of the hype is in knowing what Hernandez looks like in the day, and how he not only captured that at night (a rare thing, indeed, back then), but did it in black and white with an antiquated type of camera. The amount of detail that came out in that photo was quite extraordinary and is only now being easily duplicated by DSLR cameras with the ISO set very high. The hype lies in about equal parts achievement and composition, IMO.
+DixieDiarist Actually if you listen to Adams explanation about this image, he tells that this was shot during the last minutes of daylight. What caught his eye first was the reflection of the very low sun on the crosses of the graveyard. So the foreground was still lit at least a bit. He used some formula he knew regarding the brightness of the moon to guestimate the exposure for sky and background and the foreground still got a bit of sunlight and therefore is so "shiny". Technically it was a brilliant thing although I assume that it also was a lot of luck; Adams himself was not sure if he really hit it and he wanted to make another shot to bracket it, someting he usually did not do, but the sun was down when he had the camera set up for the second shot and the bright crosses were dull grey so he did not shoot again.
+Thorsten Latz The moonrise was probably a technical nightmare, it's even hard to do this today with good digital cameras if you don't know how to use the built-in lightmeter and spot-meter/bracket. It's not taken in night, but it has extreme shadows and highlights, and if you know film then you know he didn't have 8 zones of exposure like some cameras have today.. Ansel had nothing aswell, he had to guess this exposure based on what he thought because the sun and moon was constantly moving and he didn't have time to make exposure reading and calculate. But I don't think this was not the reason he shot the image, the image have clearly a deeper feeling. Moon over graveyard? He have a lot of negative space in the sky around the moon so it feels more "relaxed" in my opinion. I think he waited a bit for moon to be off-center because humans love things with a twist and not all "centered", all way down to using a red filter with polarizer for sky to make it more plugged. He reacted to the "extraordinary moment" as he said in the movie and he made feeling come through by exposing and printing well. It's one of my favorite images from Ansel and it reminds me of people I've lost.
+DixieDiarist As Aleksander T.E. just pointed out: It is not a night shot. His son explained in an interview how it was made, the sun was in their back and very low which is why the crosses at the grave yard where so incredibly bright and he also explained that Ansel wanted to take another shot, probably bracket a bit, but could not for the sun was down completely when he was ready. +Aleksander Torset Eriksen Perfectly right and I know all that. From the technical aspect it was a nightmare picture and he nailed it quite nice, although I saw an interview where he commented on it that this is also a hellish negative to print from for it is not as 'perfect' in a technical sense as most of his other negatives. But mastering complicated situations is the handmanship part of the job and we all know that Adams was a master at that. The aesthetic part is another question and when I think about aesthetics, craftsmanship is not really that relevant. A beautiful image is a beautiful image, no matter if it was very easy or very difficult to obtain technically and if you present an ugly image, this image does not get more beautiful by the fact that you went through extraordinarily high difficulties to get it. As I said in my original comment: I do not consider this an ugly image at all. It is a nice and pleasing image and I would be proud if it would be one of mine. But if I wanted an original large size Adams print in my living romm, printed by his gallery, then it would never ever be this image. It just does not talk to me nearly as much as many of his landscape photos and it does not matter at all, that the landscapes probably had been much, much easier to shoot.
Photography used to be a skilled profession when the cameras were more difficult and expensive to work with, but digital has over saturated the landscape. Anyone can be a photographer now, and if Ansel was around now, his images would sadly not have the same impact, simply because of the amount of photos we see now. Not saying digital is a bad thing but it has made it more difficult for professional photographers to make a name for themselves.
If anything, he was all wrong being excited for digital photography, everything is lost leaving more to the machine and a pixelated screen. The film medium is still superior to digital, same when it comes to prints, the silver gelatin is superior in all qualities compared to the inkjet. As for everything else he said, it’s mostly textbook, but one doesn’t necessarily need to previsualize an image in his mind before making a good one, although I don’t know anyone else who could do it as well a few years back other than Michael Kenna and his extremely long exposures.. but it remains pretty much true for everyone else, because in previsualization there is the identity of the artist, the trademark and the first step towards creation. Almost all great photographers know/knew in advance what the image would look like, it’s particularly more true with black and white photographers, one of the first steps of procedure towards the making of an image worthy of attention, anticipating where can what you see and frame be lead to, a rather difficult mental and emotional thing to do. I don’t know, I’ve tried doing photography for years as it has always held my intention, gave me a sensation of awe and inspiration, and I’ve given it a lot of time, spent a lot of ressources and self sacrifice to it but nothing good really came out of it, at the end of the day it’s a God driven gift to be an artist of any sort, you cannot train to acquire intuition, you cannot become anything you want in this world, that’s the lie the world tells everybody, you just can’t go against what the higher powers decreed. Angel, Stieglitz, Stand, Bresson, Kertesz, Keighley, Emerson, White, Rembrandt, Turner, Brandt, Demachy, Misonne, Sudek, and I’m forgetting about dozens of other greats but the whole lot at the pantheon of visual artists, they were very peculiar people of their own, lived in their own peculiar times, were moved to places that God made them go to at the right particular time, with the particular emotion and mental state associated to it, with the times the world was living in, with the technology that was there or being developed, you can’t make this up, you can’t “replicate” what these guys did and no matter what they say about it, or how hard they try to explain it but the truth is self evident to the one who sees and has spent enough time trying, and I know they were self driven by powers far greater than them, same goes for Mozart, Bach or Chopin, even the Rolling Stones, it’s God who created everything, made every image and every melody, every man and woman, every tree and every snow flake, Man is just the instrument of the will of God, same with the clouds, he cannot escape what God has chosen for him to do. If God said it’s photography or painting, then there is no way in the world you gonna be a butcher or a pianist and enjoy it as much, you could try, but then it’s only confusion, sorrow and strife, and even confusion sorrow and strife is what God makes you be and feel, nothing belongs to us. You can feel it very deeply when your being doesn’t enjoy doing something, the same way you feel it very deep when you love something, and try as hard as you can but don’t get anything in return. All I ever wanted to do was to become a great visual artist, I don’t seem to care about anything else, I’ve looked and tried everything I could, i don’t have much desire within me to do anything else nor can spend as much time on anything else as when it comes to photography, I tried painting, I tried video making, I never enjoyed other forms nor was willing to spend a great deal of time or self sacrifice everything naturally as I do with photography but I suck at it, it’s like everything has been done already, and I feel like I’m in constant battle with God trying to let him me become a photographer but He won’t let me be it, and I’m left with nothing else, I’m torn apart on the inside, I don’t have this peace of mind, this enjoyment and self satisfaction like an Ansel Adams had doing what he loved and getting success with it. I’m don’t care at all when I comes to money or fame, I don’t care about these things, all I want is to make good images but I can’t make anything good no matter how hard I’m trying. Sleepless nights, sleeping in my car, thousands of kilometres traveled, thousands of euros spent, days searching, yet nothing is given to me in return, no love for the world and the things I witness these days around me or in nature, no love back. 5 years I’ve been trying day and night, giving it my all everyday, never stopping to think about photography like an infused desire embedded within my blood about this beautiful art form, and I’m given nothing, just negatives to be burned, unfruitful with countless hours spent, only sorrow and sickness, only confusion as to what I am and what I’m supposed to do to find any kind of relief or sense of joy for living in this phuccing world. I haven’t asked anything, I never asked to have the desire for photography, nor the love for it, it was put within me, I never even asked to be born or have life either, and what do I get in return ? Grief, inequity, this idol of jealousy dancing in front of me, mocking me, frustrating me. This life is a son of a b to me. Some people were made for it, others aren’t, and guess what, it’s the Bible in a nutshell. Some are blessed, some are cursed, God made some people special and others common and useless, but you just can’t love life when life just craps on you 24/7. I feel for all the cursed ones of this world, I felt for Hitler at times too, seeing how God clearly favours the Jews for everything and craps on everybody else, one of the reasons it lead me to read as I just couldn’t get past the favouritism the world gives to jewish people. Ansel Adams ? Another jew of course, ahhh surely God wouldn’t have made his life a living hell like mine ! Love his photographs though, not even jealous of his success, he’s been beaten to it, hiking, carrying heavy loads and all and was relieved through the process by creating wonderful visuals and pieces of art, I’ve done the same, just wanted to make pictures as inspiring, I’ve been beaten to it, but I’m given nothing in return, no place would give me love, no love I could find in any place, all I found was chaos in my days, excessive urbanism, ugliness, modern things, things already seen and done. F this world, the darkness that came before was far better than this devilish light, that’s my conclusion at 32 years old, with nothing but infection that nobody knows where it came from nor cares about as a gift, that’s the only thing I’ve received for all the sacrifices I made, disease, nothing else, no friend, no money, no family, no lover, no work, just disease, fingers pointed at me all day, even my own mother calling be crazy and insane, that’s what I get for no reason nor any sin worthy of such a punition. And f you all mockers in advance
