Mike,
Have a look at APOD (below) and compare it with the original Adams picture Link (below that)..Even if you convert the color picture to B&W and fiddle with the overall contrast, gamma, andbrightness, you can never get that magical glow of light above the mountains that Adams somehow created. And the contrast in the mountains where the snowfields and glaciers were is just incredible. (Admitedly therewas more snow in 1948 than now.)
Ansel must have dodged the moon in the darkroom to make it so bright relative to the mountains. Nothing like a comparison of amateurs and professionals to show the difference between them.
Amateurs
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4848982″>Ansel’s
-rakkity–Just another amateur
rakkity
Thanks for the link to NPR. I’ve been listening to NPR’s on-line programs here at Nobeyama, but never thought to go back to Sept 15. According to Adam’s last assistant, speaking on NPR, Adams went back to Glacier Point many times until I got precisely the right light for his picture.
michael
I’m a color fiend, but the difference in those two photographs is dramatic. The color version is a yawner, in spite of the subject matter.
BirdBrain
I really enjoyed this post and seeing the comparison….has anyone had good luck doing Black and white with digital camera’s?
smiling Dan
Rakitty, loved this post.
Agree, Ansel’s is spectacular, but Russel’s is amazing in capturing the identical composition.
I’ll bet Michael could Photoshop-merge the two and produce a great color version of Ansel’s!
btw, I’ve been checking out the (now waning) full moon the past few nights. Wow, it truly is high, and its shadows magnificent!
rakkity
Here in Nobeyama, for the past 3 weeks I’ve been watching the moon get bigger and bigger
every night, too. Despite the incessant snow,
we’ve had more clear skies than not. In the late evenings, as I tramp from the computer building to the dormitory, the moon lights up my way and creates surreal shadows around the telescopes. I feel like I’m in Area 51, with snowy, ghostly Yatsutake mountain hanging spectrally overhead.
Yes, Russell did a great job of using the moon and parallax to locate the time & spot of Adam’s picture. I think he has identified the time and location of most, if not all, of Adam’s moonlit shots.
If you want to find out what Ansel Adam’s pictures look like in color, you don’t need Michael. Just go find (google?) the album that contains his attempts at color. They pale in comparison to his B&W’s, and show why he returned to colorless landscapes.
adam
A fascinating but mystifying endeavor … Why take a stab at what’s been done, especially done so well? Analyze and sleuth, by all means (a quite a clever bit of research*), or even emulate/interpret, sure. But why re-create? Especially knowing, as presumably many there did, that the darkroom work will have been a major part of the result … What next — folks camping along the highway outside Hernandez, NM?
And even aside such (partially facetious) objections, it’s an unattainable goal — our atmosphere’s changed (and I don’t just mean the clouds in Adams’ image that are missing — through no fault of Doescher’s), as has the forest, even the landscape, and the recording medium’s different — despite a few there with Ansel-ish “giant view” cameras.
Even so, were this bizarre feat to be attempted, I might have advocated the nomination of a likeliest-to-succeed and armed that one individual/team with representative equipment — say, Jim Brandenburg atop a Woodie with a bellows rig …
* (akin to that proving Amundsen missed the South Pole — or was it that Cook missed the North … ? Rakk? Any help here?)
michael
I’m too chicken to set my camera to take black and white, but I do desaturate in Photoshop.
What are you all doing down here, anyway, having your own private conversation?
rakkity
Jim Brandenburg might have done a much better job with a color shot from Glacier Point than the astronomer amateurs. But I think that particular landscape cries out for B&W and some darkroom artwork.
(It was Peary that missed the N. pole. Amundson found the S. pole, and Cook missed everything.
The NG sponsored a study of Peary’s trip that was, indeed, analyzed in like fashion to the AA pix.)
And what’s wrong with private conversations in a blog, anyway?
adam
Thanks for the followthrough, Sir Rakkity! I had a feeling I was impugning the wrong explorers, but my Google search failed to concretely clarify my reference (though Peary’s name did come up). I distinctly recall a photo of someone kneeling beside a flag with a few minor ice bumps in the background, all backlit by a brilliant sun, and reading a description of the triangulation study of the shadows based on the date proving [he] was somewhere else …
michael
Nothing, in fact your discussions remind me that I’d better finish “Ice” so Adam too can delve into the icy depths of so many deaths. I hate to keep blathering on about that book, but…maybe I’ve turned into Dan. Anyway, I just finished Abbey’s story and I feel like I was freed from the freezer. And, oh my, what a writer. Isn’t he the guy who was buried or had his ashes scattered somewhere publicly by his buddies?
rakkity
Yep, Abbey had his ashes sneaked into a wild place by his pals, and he was returned to the desert he loved. Other Abbey worth reading:
1. Everything he wrote.
I particularly enjoyed the Monkey Wrench Gang, and have read his Desert Solitaire 3 times. If you haven’t read Abbey, I’d just go to Amazon and fill your shopping cart up with all his books.
If you press me, I might put a book or two of Abbey’s on the burro train heading north. (On its way is Baldacci’s Hour Game.)
Abbey fan
I’ve got much of Abbey’s output myself — discovered him in high school somehow and read and reread …
michael
There are fundamentals missing in my life..inexplicably…like never having seen Psycho or The Sound Of Music or reading MWG.
adam
Those are all rectifiable …