Ansel Adams was someone I admired long before I turned professional. Some people see his work now and don’t think it’s anything special since we are inundated with high quality imagery, but he was a trailblazer. He had a great sense of design, would do almost anything to get the shot he wanted, and of course his technical skills are legendary.
In the school I attended, Brooks Institute, we had assignments based on his concepts of exposure and development. In particular, we photographed the Santa Barbara courthouse which has a huge archway and white stucco exterior. The idea was to see what combination of film exposure and development would provide the best shadow and highlight detail with a straight print with no dodging or burning. The final class presentation was nine 4x5 prints in a grid mounted on a 16x20 board, representing negatives that were normal exposure, 1 stop under, 1 stop over, and each of these with normal development, 1 stop under developed, 1 stop over developed. Brooks was all about presentation, so these had to be perfectly mounted, otherwise it was rejected.
While very few of us work with B&W negatives now, these concepts translate directly to digital. I learned early on to expose for the highlights and “develop” in Photoshop for shadow detail. If the highlights are gone in the initial exposure, they can’t be recovered. When working with a new client in my studio, where I always shot tethered to my computer for instant feedback, I always had to explain that the images might look a bit too dark, but the final image would be perfect.
Ansel Adams would have loved digital. In one of his last books, when the very first rudimentary digital cameras were being developed, he wrote that he hoped to live long enough to experience this new technology. It fit perfectly with his technical side.
