Homage to Ansel Adams

As I pointed out a few posts back, April marked the 25th anniversary of the death of Ansel Adams, my favourite photographer. Today's walk was in his honour. Below: the Jeziorki wetlands, taken from the ul. Dumki side.

Whenever asked which camera he used, Adams would always reply, "the biggest I can carry." He tended to use the 10"x8" view camera, always on a tripod. The negative, some 60 times larger in surface area than a 35mm negative, yielded results of the highest possible quality.

Above: Silver birches on ul. Trombity. To ensure the pictures were in as sharp focus as possible, Adams would opt for fine-grain, low-sensitivity film, long exposures and small apertures. Which is what I aimed to do today. All these pictures were taken with the camera on my sturdy wooden tripod, exposures from 1/5th to 1/20th second at f22 to f25. ISO on the Nikon D80 only goes down to 100.

Above: Narrow potato field alongside ul. Nawłocka. I wonder what Ansel Adams would have made of digital photography; whether he would have adapted to it or stayed true to large format film. And if he'd made the jump - when. Would he have been satisfied with 10 megapixels?

Above: view from ul. Nawłocka looking towards ul. Trombity. Adams was a perfectionist. It's much easier perfecting images digitally than chemically!

The Nikon D80 offers the option of shooting in B&W. Why would anyone wish to do that? Well, one thing it can do is in-camera filtering. I had this set to 'red', which darkens blue skies and makes red objects (such as the poppies in the foreground) lighter.