Saturday 6 June 2009

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.

2 comments:

Neighbour said...

Michael,

It's worth to read this before converting images to B&W:
http://www.fotosite.pl/artykuly/cyfrowa-ciemnia/cyfrowa-fotografia-czarno-biala.html
If you convert to B&W in camera, you can no longer influence the image. Besides, you can only get what camera's B&W conversion algorithm can deliver - above site goes through this in detail.

What a nice morning today - I have seen this heron again, almost above your house while running in the morning.

Happy shooting,

Michael Dembinski said...

Thanks for the excellent link - very useful info for me. I shall return to shooting colour and converting to B&W in the computer.