I love reading Ansel Adams. Even today, his books are loaded with useful, practical insights that we need to be focusing on as we take pictures and process them. For example, in the forward he points out that “ … the ultimate objective in photography is the picture … “.
If the ‘ultimate objective’ is the print, then the ultimate starting point is in your mind. You may have taken an hour to set up the picture or only a millisecond, but however much time you took, there was an idea in your mind, some reason WHY you pressed the shutter. Even BEFORE previsualization, there is an idea, a something, a reason, or something that starts the process. Something that catches your eye that causes you to take the picture. I think this is true even for snapshots. Even Adams took snapshots though his most casual shots beat most anything I see others trying to do! Pressing the shutter release is not a reflex action, it’s not preprogrammed or automatic in any way. You press the shutter because for some reason, you want to capture something that you see.
At the other end of the process, that ‘Ultimate Objective’ still exists even in the digital age. It could be on a web page or in a presentation slide or in an electronic picture frame, but whatever form it takes it is still ‘The Print’. Between pressing the shutter and displaying the picture, you’d like to be sure that you not only captured what you wanted so that other people can see it, but you’d like the picture to present what you felt when you decided to press the shutter.
Too many pictures don’t achieve either objective because most people think the process is complete when the picture is taken. What I believe Ansel Adams is about, at least what he’s about for me, is learning to achieve both objectives using those tools available as well as you can.
Adams said “A certain simplicity of approach is essential.” In essence, it’s better to have fewer tools that you are thoroughly comfortable with than the latest, greatest available in the photographic arsenal. We have an absolutely wonderful selection of tools available today, not only cameras with capabilities that were considered impossible only 20 years ago, but software and photographic printers capable of results considered impossible only a few years ago.
Despite the wealth of technology, simplicity beats technology every time. The best technology can’t make up for a poorly conceived or exposed image.
Stevens Pass Snowscape
My Stevens Pass Snowscape was taken with what is basically a point-and-shoot camera (Kodak Z730) and processed in GIMP. No special processing was applied beyond the black & white conversion filter. In other words, I tried to make it as simple as I could because it was part of a series of Black&White conversion experiments I was doing using GIMP, Photoshop, and Paint Shop Pro on Mac, Windows, and Linux platforms.