Different Views
View from our “beach.”
The requested view .
Same view, not so close.
We all (Matt and Debbie) went to the MFA last night to see the Ansel Adam’s exhibit. As I was walking out I heard some guy asking his girlfriend, “Why couldn’t Adams make just one album in color?” As we neared our car, Diane said, “That was a lot of black and white.” This morning I woke up and thought, maybe I should experiment more with black and white.
I also wondered what Adam thinks of Ansel, given that Mr Adams would squirrel his photographic plates off to the darkroom and return with finished prints of what he felt he saw, rather than what he saw.
Adam thinks Adams a genius, not a journalist. To imbue a B&W photograph of landscape with emotion is no small task, and if it took as much strategy as open-heart surgery, with hundreds of little pieces of paper masks in a choreographed sequence of exposures, well, hey …
Nice crop on this post — one wonders what the full-frame was like, but there’s fun eye-motion here. One also wonders, though, why the alleged fulfilling of the enlargement request is not … Senility, or did you think we wouldn’t notice?
Comment by adam — October 21, 2005 @ 7:56 am
Ansel did do some color work, and some of it was published in a coffee-table book, now long out of print. The pictures were good, but he said he didn’t have the control over the output that B&W gave him. Of course, that was back in the days when to make color prints you had to do seven baths in total darkness. (I did it once back in ’63, and it was no fun.)
Patrick has been taking B&W pictures exclusively for the past year since we gave him an ancient totally manual Pentax 35 mm (his request). He’s
got darkroom equipment, but little time to work in it. We’re still waiting for prints.
It’s much harder to take “interesting” photos in B&W. Brightness, contrast, gamma, and composition are so much more crucial.
“prints of what he felt he saw, rather than what he saw.” How does one distinguish? That’s deep.
Comment by rakkity — October 21, 2005 @ 10:36 am
Okay, wiseguy, tell me why you think the photo I posted today is not the same as the version posted on 10/19/2005?
The quote might have been closer to – producing what he felt rather than what appeared on his plates. He was a big fan of dodging and burning, and if you look at his later work, after he moved away from his funny soft focus stuff, you’ll find highlights which Adam is fond of saying “don’t exist in nature.”
Comment by michael Miller — October 21, 2005 @ 5:51 pm
Adam’s also fond of saying, “Nice switcheroo there, Mikey … ” NOW it’s the same source image. Why does the boy in men make them think “It was like that when I got here” is at all believable … ?
Comment by adam — October 21, 2005 @ 7:09 pm