Zone System and Digital Photography
I was going through my ‘Ansel Adams’ update this morning and came across this interesting blog entry from Beth Jennings Photography at:
http://bjphotography.wordpress.com/2010/07/04/conquering-the-camera-assignment-4/
it’s well worth the time to read.
Looking at the iPad, it looks like an excellent platform for a photographer in the field. Lightweight, easy to use, easy to write with .. Even using the on screen keyboard .. But most of the apps I’ve looked at seem at best marginally useful. Worse, the really useful add-on to allow saving photos on the iPad doesn’t seem to be available from any vendor I’ve talked to. I don’t care about a built in camera, bur I do want to use it to hold photos.
Obviously, i’ve got more work to do.
Ansel Adams, Camera & Lens, Morgan & Morgan, 1971, p69.
Ansel Adams talks a lot about Light Meters, primarily because his approach is a combination of science and art, where science is used to enable the art. I don’t think anyone would suggest that he wasn’t an artist because his photographs have been accepted as art from long before his death. So his focus on the science underlying his art must have been useful to him. Primarily, science is based on measurement. Measurement of things that CAN be measured. Unmeasurables can be part of science, but only to the extent they have measurable consequences.
Within photography, the light meter is one of our most important measuring instruments. With older cameras, we needed a separate meter. Most cameras over the last 20 years have meters built in. This is where we run into problems
An interesting question and I’m not the only one to be asking it. David Ziser on his blog Digital Protalk asks the same question. His answer:
You’ve just got to ask yourself the question, “If Ansel Adams was shooting digital, would he have used Lightroom?” I think the obvious answer is “YES”. Why? Because Ansel was a “master manipulator” of film, exposure, processing, chemistry, burning, dodging, printing - all the tools of the analogue image. Had he been shooting digital, he too would have been “master manipulator” of all the digital tools as well.
I can’t agree more.
In fact, I’d go even further and say that tools like Photoshop and Lightroom would have had significant input from Adams, helping to form the direction they would have taken. I think he would have been in on the ground floor with Digital and as it developed, he would have influenced it’s direction. I think he would have experimented with digital picture TAKING as it developed and he would have used scanners as soon as they started to produce images fine enough to satisfy his spirit. However, I don’t know that he would have made the transition completely to digital even now.
I think Ansel Adams would have embraced digital photography and been one of the first to use Photoshop, expanding his use over the years. He once aid “I am sure the next step will be the electronic image, and I hope I shall live to see it. I trust that the creative eye will continue to function, whatever technological innovations may develop.” (1983 from http://www.photoquotes.com/ShowQuotes.aspx?id=10&name=Adams,Ansel).
I imagine Adams would have had several digital cameras as well as digital backs for his view cameras. But I also think he would not have given up on film, at least not yet.
On the computer, I think he would have used Photoshop and would have had a meticulous system for tracking his photos.
I recently purchased Adobe Lightroom for overall management of my images. Having tried iphoto and some other systems, I did a 30 day trial of Lightroom and Aperture and found that Lightroom better met my needs. Now I’m trying to learn to use it better.
I also purchased the book ‘Adobe Photoshop Lightroom & Photoshop Workflow’ by Mark Fitzgerald to help me learn to work with the programs better. So far, I haven’t been impressed with Adobe’s documentation. It’s nice for some specifics, but for general learning, what I’ve seen so far just doesn’t cut it. This book works for me as a newbie to Lightroom, though I’m sure I’ll outgrow it with a bit of work.
What I REALLY like about Lightroom is:
Have you ever been moved by a book … I was when I read Visual Poetry by Chris Orwig.
The Visual Poetry Flickr Group
If Ansel Adams wrote his Basic Photography Series today?
If Ansel Adams wrote his Basic Photography Series today, I think he’d break ‘The Negative’ and ‘The Print’ down into 3 volumes, possibly called ‘Capturing the Image’, ‘Working with the Image’, and ‘Printing the Image’.
Volume 2: Capturing the Image - the basics of capturing the image including exposure, the zone system, raw capture, etc.
Volume 3: Working with the Image - creating the image you visualized starting from the raw image and processing it to achieve your creative vision
Volume 4: Printing the Image - printing and displaying images
Volume 5: Natural Light - substantially the same, how to use natural light
Volume 6: Artificial Light - substantially the same, how to use artificial light
I’d have loved to read those books. I’ve been reading his original books and trying to formulate what he said in terms appropriate for the digital world, but it’s not easy. I think it would have been easy for him though. In 1983, Adams said “I am sure the next step will be the electronic image, and I hope I shall live to see it. I trust that the creative eye will continue to function, whatever technological innovations may develop.”
I’m sure Ansel Adams would have embraced digital photography and possibly become its greatest practitioner.
Does it? See my own thoughts as part of the thread ‘Quantity Leads to Quality‘ in Ben Long’s blog.
I think this discussion will continue forever.
I recently purchased Adobe’s Lightroom after trialing both it and Apple’s Aperture. I chose Lightroom because it’s mix of features best matched my own working style, though both packages had something unique that they brought to the table. Since I purchased it, I’ve been reading books and talking to people about Lightroom, trying to learn to use it as well as I possibly can.
In the process of talking to other people using Lightroom, I’ve run across what almost seems to be an assumption that Lightroom can only be used with Photoshop as an external editor. Certainly, in what I’ve read, when the external editor is mentioned, the author goes into Photoshop. However, Adobe was smarter than this because not only can you change the primary editor Lightroom will use, but you can also configure a 2nd editor for use with Lightroom. That leaves us open for lots of possibilities. One of the more interesting ones for people who can’t afford Photoshop is GIMP.
If you go to the Lightroom Preferences, you’ll find a configuration for an Additional External Editor. I selected GIMP and configured Lightroom to pass the file to it as an 8-bit, Adobe RGB(1998) file at as resolution of 240 using ZIP compression:
As a simple trial, I selected a picture I recently took and went to the ‘Photo->Edit In’ menu from which I was now able to select either Photoshop or GIMP. Selecting GIMP automatically started the required X-Windows environment under OSX and then GIMP itself:
On doing a very simple edit, in this case just cropping the image to make it easy to see when I got back to Lightroom, I saved the image (which now has -edit added to the end of the name) and came back to Lightroom where it shows up next to the original image which is still selected.
OK … so I can use another editor or even two editors, why would I want to?? There are several reasons to add this to your toolkit:
As I spend more time with the application, I’m also finding new and interesting ways to use it. I’ll report on some of the other options as I go on. One of the interesting features is the ability to save presets with configurations you like, so here’s an image I’ve used for testing a variety of B&W conversions:
Here is a very simple, yet custom, B&W conversion of this image done simply by choosing a preset!
I’ve recently posted an article at
http://digital-photography-school.com/forum/tutorials/103652-lightroom-external-editing.html
about using Lightroom with other editors, specifically GIMP. I’ve also posted an extended article here in this blog.
I plan to say more about Lightroom as I go forward.