Would Ansel Adams Have Gone Digital?

Roland Piquepaille writes "After viewing photographs by Christopher Burkett, which are not digitally manipulated, Peter Lewis wondered what place have digital cameras and image manipulations in the art of photography. And a question hit his mind. If Ansel Adams, one of the most famous photographers of the 20th century, was still alive, would have he gone digital? Lewis talked at great length with Richard LoPinto, vice president for SLR camera systems at Nikon Inc. to find an answer. And guess what? LoPinto thinks Ansel Adams would have loved digital cameras. The article also discusses digital camera resolution and the future for film camera sales. This overview contains more details and a small photograph by Christopher Burkett."

Try again

If you're planning on beating 8x10, you're going to need another order of magnitude...

200 to 1000 megapixels for ASA 50 film in that size.

Re:Try again : Done !!!

Maybe 1.09 billion pixels (40,784 x 26,800) is enough to beat it :

http://www.tawbaware.com/maxlyons/gigapixel.htm

It is done with a Canon D60 6 MPixels DSLR and PTAssembler + PanoramaTools, two great freeware and easy to use tools.

http://www.tawbaware.com/ptasmblr.htm

Don't forget to check the others pictures in "Max Lyons Digital Image Gallery" :

http://www.tawbaware.com/maxlyons/

Re:Anyone ever talk to Ansel Adams?

It sounds like your answers is no then because no such camera is likely to exist for the forseeable future and building one from scratch would cost orders of magnitude more than a lifetime of sheet film even for someone like Adams.

50 megapixel would also be pretty grainy at the large prints adams liked to make. A 2 megapixel doing a 4x6 print would be the same resolution as a 50 megapixel doing a 20x30 print. 20x30 is a typical size for adams, and a 2 megapixel is just barely tolerable at 4x6.

The other side is creative control over the chemicals. We're talking about digital manipulation but analog manipulation has existed as long as chemical photography has. Ansel Adams was a master of that and I doubt he'd give up the techniques he spent a lifetime learning.

Besides the obvious darkroom stuff, film has interesting quirks. A 1 minute exposure is not 60 times effective as a 1 second exposure on real film. How will a CCD behave; in Adams style of photography, long exposures are common.

Jason
ProfQuotes [profquotes.com]

Re:Anyone ever talk to Ansel Adams?

Yes, long exposure is Adams signature style, that is because he used tiny apertures, and the light came through such a tiny hole, that it needed a good long time to make the impression on the film.

This is exactly why I said long exposures are common in Adams style of photography. Small arperture means larger depth of field, and for landscape you want the DoF to be maximized.

My point is that film has an inverse saturation curve that is somewhat unique for each kind of film. Adams was skilled to the point where he had an intuitive feel for how the films he used would react. How does a CCD react to a long (several minutes) exposure? Does the charge bleed off and it behaves sort of like film? Does it bleed into other pixels and fog the whole image? Is it perfectly stable and a 10 minute exposure is a 5 minute exposure + 1EV?

If even you're right about the pixel count (and I tend to believe you because of lack of trust of the hardware makers), you're only arguing that this special 50MP camera would be as good as Adams sheet film. Where is the advantage? Why should he abandon a simple (cheap) box that costs a few dollars (today's value) per exposure in favour of something that is arguable just as good, but costs more than he made in his lifetime? It's not like he needed to take lots of shots; his pictuers were well planned out and took a long time to take each one.

Maybe the digital would have made him take lots more pictures and spend less time on each. Then instead of hundreds of truly great works of art, he might have taken tens of thousands of mediocre snapshots.

I really don't understand this digital push. It's good for photojournalists who care more about getting the picture to their publisher as fast as possible than image quality or whether the picture will be useful in 50 years. It's also good for people learning to take pictures so they can get some instant feedback and take lots of pictures to experiment.

But for most people film is still better. A typical person who shoots 5-10 rolls a year on vacations and at parties will find that digital has a much higher per-shot cost over the lifetime of the camera; a $300 digital gives comperable features and feel to a $30 P&S film camera. At 5-10 rolls/year you will never recoup those costs over the life of the camera.

As far as quality, you might argue that a $3000 digital is comparable to film, but the $300 digital is definately inferior to film. So for the typical person, digital costs more per shot and gives inferior quality. Where is the advantage?

Jason
ProfQuotes [profquotes.com]

Re:Anyone ever talk to Ansel Adams?

Yes! I've been trying to find this quote for a while, but it wasn't in the book I thought it was. The following quote is by Leo Laporte in the forward of "Shooting Digital [shooting-digital.com]" by Mikkel Aaland:

Mikkel Aaland has worked as an itinerant photographer, making pictures much as his 19th century counterparts must have, in a makeshift studio-on-wheels, capturing images of anyone with a few dollars to spare. After nine years on the road, the result was his 1981 book, "Country Fair Portraits".

Shortly thereafter, another legend, Ansel Adams, told Mikkel that if he were beginning all over again he'd be shooting digital. Mikkel took the great man at his word and became one of the first to use, and write about digital photography.

It's an anecdotal quote, but 1981 is a big year for digital photography as it's when Sony released its first "Mavica", probably the first mass-market digital camera. I'd say that Ansel saw the potential in the technology even then, assuming of course he hadn't already encountered digital imagery from early recon satellites, the SR71 and so on.

Re:Hard to say..this guy though definitely would h

Ansel Adams and the group of photographers - the f64 group - essentially worked to promote a style established by Edward Weston. It has much in common with Stieglitz' Photo-Secession - the concept of absolute honesty combined with absolute control of materials.

Adams' main contribution to photographic technology was his 'Zone' exposure system, which combines exposure, development and printing into a single system. It was like a very early ColorSync (even if it was in black and white).

Photography before f64 and the Photo-Secession was only considered 'art' if it was manipulated. Most Victorian photographic art was sacherinely allegorical. When photographers such as Weston and Adams came onto the scene, their images were considered shockingly raw.

To suggest that Adams was somehow considered a fraud would be to misconstrue the history of photography.

Re:Hard to say..this guy though definitely would h

Still it was true that Adams himself considered the majority of the art of photography to be done in the darkroom. I think his primary interest in digital photography (esp. as someone else pointed out, a system like Kodac's digital backs) would have been in being able to more flexibly "develop" photographs using tools such as Photoshop (or the Gimp ;)

I'm not suggesting that his photos would be altered (though the amount of dodging and burning he did came pretty close to that) but that he could experiment with different ways of "developing" a single shot.

An Environmentalist will choose digital

Ansel Adams was above all a environmentalist, probally more so than a photographer. Do you know the kind of chemicals needed to make a roll of film into a negitive? Just the enviromental savings from the lack of processing would have given him a reason to use digital.

Re:An Environmentalist will choose digital

You don't know what you are talking about. The chemicals to process black and white film are generally fairly benign. The worst for the environment are the insoluable metals (e.g. silver) disolved in used fixer. However, you can run a silver recovery system.

Compare this to the chemicals used to produce the sensor in a digital camera. Just a tiny bit of hydroflouric acid will do more damage to the environment than the silver from all the film you'll probably ever use.

Re:An Environmentalist will choose digital

One of Adams's favorite developers was Kodak HC-110. This is a liquid concentrate used at very high dilutions (Adams actually favored it at dilutions much higher than Kodak recommends) with an extremely long shelf life. I've heard it was intentionally developed as an environmentally friendly developer (I believe it's free of metol, pyrogallol, and Paraphenylene Diamine, the more toxic developing agents). Nowadays there are even developers based on vitamin-C (XTOL, maybe? I've never used it).

Yes, XTOL is based on vitamin-C as a developing agent.

The reason Adams like HC-110 at very high dilutions is that it reduces the solvent effect during development resulting in high acutance and therefore very sharp negatives. This will also increase grain, but since he was shooting large format, the grain isn't much of an issue.

pyro is really nasty stuff, but can produce wonderful negatives. Edward Weston was a big user of pyro developers and it is believe that they contributed significant to his parkinson's disease.

My uncle studied under Adams

My uncle is older, and got fascinated with digital technology once it hit his radar screen (he isn't a professional photographer). He once remarked that "Ansel would have LOVED this stuff...". I'm not a photographer, so I didn't get him to elaborate, but this probably backs up the author's assertion (at least anecdotaly).

Prints

I'm sure it will all wind up being digital, but there will be those die-hard people that will never change. (Like Charlie Chaplan refused to use films with sound, and didn't think it was an appropriate art form.) However, the nature of a print totally changes. It's a big deal to have an original print of a photo, one that's done from the negative. How is this going to effect the monetary value of the photos? For the record, I didn't RTFA. It might be answered in the article. (At least I'm honest.)

Re:Prints

I'm sure it will all wind up being digital, but there will be those die-hard people that will never change. (Like Charlie Chaplan refused to use films with sound, and didn't think it was an appropriate art form.) However, the nature of a print totally changes. It's a big deal to have an original print of a photo, one that's done from the negative. How is this going to effect the monetary value of the photos? For the record, I didn't RTFA. It might be answered in the article. (At least I'm honest.)

I'll just say that a true professional uses whatever tools are most appropriate for the job. If it's digital, it's digital. If it's analog, it's analog. Different photographers (or professionals in any field, really) do get used to working a certain way, and learn various tricks and techniques that they fear won't transfer over to a new medium, but it just then becomes a case where the advantages need to outweigh the hardship involved in learning a new system.

I don't think any true pro like Ansel Adams would be blindly loyal to one camera format or another (and that's all digital is; just another format in the grand scheme of things). If he didn't want to change, it wouldn't be because he was some sort of "die-hard" that refused to embrace new technology. It would only be because he didn't believe the advantages in the new format (convenience, ease of use, lightness of the equipment - which can be a big deal to a pro photographer) yet outweighed the disadvantages (lower resolution, lower sensitivity, less accurate color reproduction) or the difficulty in learning how to do the things you know how to do in one format on another.

In other words, it would only be because he felt that digital had not yet reached the quality of film - which is still true. But as digital improves, it's catching up fairly rapidly, and eventually I think he would have made the switch as will most current pros. I would bet that most pro landscape photographers already carry around a little point and shoot digital camera when they are not on formal shoots - as small and light as digital cameras are these days, and as good as the quality's getting, there's really no reason for a true photographer to ever be without one anymore. You never know when a great shot is going to present itself, and you're not always going to have your large-format film camera with you to capture it.

(Of course, a point and shoot film camera is just as small and light, but I do think in that segment of the market digital really pretty much has gotten to the point where the convenience eclipses any lingering resolution or color accuracy issues, and I think a lot of photographers are starting to realize that. A 5 megapixel point and shoot is good enough for the purposes of capturing quick shots that you'd otherwise miss, and with no worrying about running out of film or whether you actually got the shot afterwards.)

Re:Prints

Digital is not in any way catching up to what Ansel Adams used. Digital is catching up to the high-end 35mm gear. Ansel Adams worked with large format negatives (8x10in typically, IIRC). Comparing the size of the two formats should alone tell you why nothing digital would be his way.

I'm not to say that digital is not here and is not high quality - I'd nearly die for a digital SLR; I am saying that somebody who believes he'd adopt digital photography anywhere near the form of what it is today does not understand the topic.

Re:Prints

Mod the parent up. Its a very, very good point.

Ansel Adams would not use digital in its current form for any of his work. Ansel did use 8x10" large format for most of his career, but later in life when he could no longer hike with his 8x10" view camera and enormous surveyors tripod, he used 6x6cm Hassleblad systems.

There are many other advantages to using sheet film above and beyond the incredible resolution it provides. If you've ever read his book, "The Negative", you would see that much of his workflow depended on using sheet film. The "zone system", which he developed, only fully applies to B&W Sheet film emulsions. This involves shooting mutliple sheets of film at the same exposure setting, and developing each one differently to control contrast (N+1, N-1, etc) - see Chapter 10 of "The Negative."

Also, the dynamic range of B&W emulsions is worlds beyond what *any* digital capture can currently achieve. Ansel's books discuss capturing, in the final print, 11 different zones of tonality (Zones 0-10). Sorry, digital simply cannot do that. Period. It is a fact of physics that cannot be disputed.

This was the main reason why Ansel never did much with color (he dabbled with Kodachrome in the 1940s but didn't like the lack of tonal control it gave you - something slide film shares with digital, only digital suffers from it more severely).

Of course, all of this ignores the use of view camera movements that Ansel employed (tilt, shift, rise, draw, etc). Correcting perspective with the lens is no match for what can be done in Photoshop, since the latter method forces you to sacrafice resolution.

I'm not anti-digital by any means. It is indeed at the point of matching 35mm quality-wise, if not pricewise in the next few years (the one digital SLR that truly matches most film is the Canon 10Ds, which will set you back about 8 thousand dollars). However, to suggest that Ansel, who worked with large format B&W, would be using digital today only expressed incredible ignorance of B&W vs Digital issues, Ansel Adams' exacting standards, or more likely both. Dismiss it as marketoid speech.

Re:Digital Camera that uses SLR Lenses?

Yeah, uhm, Nikon.com and Canon.com would be good places to start.

From $900 to about $10k you can get a SLR digital camera. I've had my Canon D60 since March of 2002, it was $2199 when I bought it.

6MP, and uses Canon's entire EOS line of lenses.

Nikon has the D100 which is the D60's equiv, (now replaced by the 10D) and then th D1's from Nikon and 1D's (several models depending on your needs)

Re:Would Ansel Adams Have Gone Digital?

"Would Ansel Adams Have Gone Digital?"

Of course not. He didn't even go color.

Wrong-o. Ansel Adams did much of his commercial work in color and even has a book of his color landscapes available on Amazon

Ansel Adams in Color, ISBN 0821219804, Bulfinch Press 1993.

Here's [amazon.com]
a color landscape that's on the cover of that very book.

No freaking way

Ansel Adams was all about the integrity and subtlety of the medium. In his day, he railed against the use of resin-coated photographic papers (which he referred to as "plastic papers"), because they didn't produce an image with the same purity and subtlety as one printed on fibre based paper (as any photographer can tell you).

Everyone has seen Adams coffee table books, but one has only to stand in front of an actual Adams print to see that there is a quality to his prints that cannot be reproduced by even the highest quality methods of reproduction. Even if you're jaded by overexposure to Adams books and calendars (as I am), it is breathtaking to see his work in person.

Richard LoPinto is trying to sell digital SLRs for Nikon. Frankly, I think it is a disrespect for him to speculate that Adams would have anything to do with a digital camera, or any digital process.

He used Polaroid

He was commissioned by Polaroid to do large-format Polaroid instant film work. The photos from that commission are well known, and there was no railing about the medium even though Polaroid prints had to be hand-coated.

I think he would have gone digital.

Bruce

Re:He used Polaroid

The quailty of black and white polaroid 4x5 is superb, and the negatives you could make from the product that produced a negative could be used to make high quality prints. This is why he used these products; they were and are of the highest quality; the coating to preserve the prints doesnt have an effect, if it is applied correctly.

Adams was also a careful archivist. He would have been, at the very least, concerned about preserving his work (the negatives or thier equivalent) for the future which as we all know, is a problem of digitally stored works.

He would have cautiously experimented with it, I think.

Edward Weston on the other hand, burned his negatives when he wanted to "clean out"; he would have gone digital for sure.

Ansel was a scientist.

If you ever look into the three books that Ansel wrote, "The Camera", "The Negative", and "The Print", you can see how Ansel was a scientist. Just take a look in the backs of those books at all of the charts and graphs he has for different elements of the photographic process. He tested everything and knew more about how the film, camera, developer, and paper would react with each other, then almost anyone. Kodak would even give him new film to test out and report back on the characteristics of said film. He also came up with the zone system, which is a scientific way of going from what you want your photo to look like to actually making it look that way.
I think Ansel would have loved to test out the digital cameras and make observations on how the digital camera matched up with film cameras in different situations.

You make an excellent point

I have the 3 books and didn't even think about them until you brought it up. Not only would Ansel have loved digital cameras, he would have had the insight and ability to document their application in ways that no one else can or is doing.

Have you seen the picture of his enlarger that had something like 20 lightbulbs in an arry in the lighthouse with each one of them brought out to a toggle switch? The sort of mind that builds such a device could only be enthused about digitial technology.

An even more interesting question would be how he would create his prints. I suspect he would have a Lightjet printer, though the new inkjets with grayscale inks might have been interesting to him.

One of Ansel's most interesting quotes was to the question "what kind of camera should I get" His response was "the biggest one you can carry." He used 8x10 view cameras in his prime, but had no regrets using the Hasselblad system in his older years. If you translate "biggest" into "the highest resolution and dynamic range", there would be no problem with using a digital camera

Re:Ansel was a scientist.

Since I have a BFA in Photography, I'm probably the only person on Slashdot to have actually DONE *all* the exercises in the Adams books, and I assure you, you have completely missed the point.
Adams' books were NOT about the technology of the process. Technology was completely secondary to the issue. Adams was primarily interested in "previsualization." You see a scene you'd like to photograph, you previsiualize how you want the picture to turn out, and only THEN do you consider what technology (i.e. what lens & settings, what film speed, what developing) is necessary to produce the image you've previsualized.

heh, my mistake

For some unknown reason, I have the names of "Ansel Adams" and "Robert Mapplethorpe" mixed up in my head. I was braced for something a bit different when I clicked...

He would have, but...

He also would have kept his film cameras.

A 10-megapixel image is nice and all, but Adams used everything up to 8x10 cameras, and there's nothing like that kind of resolution even in the planning stages for digital. He certainly would have used digitals for his "small" works.

For big landscapes? no.

For example, a 4x5 using Velvia color film is in the 200 megapixel range, and the 8x10 would be closer to the gigapixel category using 25 ASA black and white...

Re:He would have, but...

A 10-megapixel image is nice and all, but Adams used everything up to 8x10 cameras, and there's nothing like that kind of resolution even in the planning stages for digital.

A 22-megapixel image [sinar.ch] is even nicer [Warning: PDF], and more and more professional photographers are switching to digital because of the advantages of end-to-end digital image processing. There still are some restrictions in high-end digital photography that make its use outside of the studio difficult or impossible, but it's matter of time and these will be overcome.

Ten years ago, most people laughed at digital photography. Today, consumer digicams are selling like hotcakes and the professionals are definitely listening, if they haven't catched on yet. Ten years from now, photography will be digital. There will still be some uses for traditional film-based photography, but it will be a niche market. And somewhere on this planet, the next Ansel Adams will buy his first digital camera and use it in creative ways the designers hadn't anticipated. Yes, Ansel Adams was an artist and a hacker in the original sense of the word in my opinion.

Another thing: no matter how big or fine-grained the film is, remember that the lens has to be able to resolve more lpi than the film, otherwise the film's resolution is wasted.

Oh, for the love of Pete.

"At great length?"

"Considering his typical tendency to use high-quality, large-format cameras and his desire that it be handy and convenient, I suspect he would be attracted to our D100, for its size and versatility and overall digital image quality.

And while waiting for the perfect shot, he'd enjoy an cool, refreshing Coca-Cola(tm)!

Give me a break, people. This was a puff piece.

Adams' darkroom == analog photoshop

Anybody who has ever gone beyond darkroom 101 knows that the best photographers do some of their best work with subtle manipulations in the dark room. Adams' zone system [arizona.edu] is all about remapping the intensities in the original scene onto a pleasing span of whites to blacks in the print. Adams himself said that "Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships." Digital cameras and image manipulation programs only pickup where the relatively crude processes in the darkroom leave off.

Anyone who claims that photography is about objectively and accurately portraying the real scene knows very little about the nonlinear properties of human vision, film, and image reproduction systems and they know even less about art.

Its not the medium, its the artist

It's the artist that makes the picture, not the medium. I have had a camera for 45 years and have never achieved close to the fame that Ansel Adams had. Just having a shiney new paint bucket does not make you a "Monet" quality artist.

Ansel spent countless hours in the darkroom to "manipulate" his pictures. THat included choosing print paper type, exposure time, dodging (making an area lighter or darker) and the list goes on and on. If he had had a digital camera to match the resolution of his film camera, he would probably have been overjoyed. However, it seems that neither Canon or Kodak with their 13 and 15 megapixel cameras have come close to the resolution of the large negative cameras, so Ansel would probably still be using film!

The Digital Darkroom

A quote from a recent PBS documentary [pbs.org]:

"He manipulated the work tremendously in the darkroom. He always said that the negative is the equivalent of the composer's score and the print is the equivalent of the conductor's performance, and the same piece of Mozart is conducted differently, performed differently, by different orchestras, different conductors, and Ansel performed his own negatives differently. ...I don't know, half or forty percent of the creative process occurred in the darkroom...."

I could only imagine what Ansel Adams could do with Photoshop!

Ansel Adams was about control

AA was all about previsuallization and control. He developed an exposure and development system call the Zone system to allow him to accurately produce the images he would previsualize.

Although, he would love the post processing ability of photoshop to manipulate faint details in a image, I think he would have been very unhappy about the limited dynamic range of digital.

I think he would have still used film for the contrast control not present in digital. Once digital cameras are developed with better contrast control he would begin to use them.

Christopher Burkett didn't manipulate his photos?

He didn't manipulate his photos digitally, true. However, this statement is made apparantly to refute the idea that he manipulated the contrast, sharpness, brightness, etc, of his images -- which he does do.

I quote: "When I work with Cibachrome, I often utilize unique masking and printing techniques to adjust the contrast, sharpness, brightness levels, and relative weight of tones and colors."

His photos are great regardless of whether the subject actually looked like it does in the photo.

Source of the Opinion

I have no idea if Ansel Adams would have used digital, but I wouldn't go asking an officer of a camera manufacturer if Adams would have bought new equipment if I wanted an objective opinion. (Disclaimer: I didn't RTFA)

Ansel Adams is well known for large format very high resolution imagery; I doubut he would have achieved the same results with today's cutting edge equipment.

Absolutely yes and no

Ansel Adams would shoot an image with the dark room in mind. He would take a scene with a large format camera (exposure times of 10 minutes or more) and would wave pieces of cardboard in front of it to dodge the sky out. He would spend an entire day in the dark room dodging and burning and pefecting his image.

Were he to use a digital camera, he probably would have had fork over huge amounts of cash to get a medium format digital back -- Ansel was a huge fan of quality, and 14megapixels just doesn't cut it for the type of work he was doing. But when he shot a scene I could see him making many different shots with various exposures and then merged them back in in photoshop.

Output, though. He probably would have had to hit up one of Epson's 7700s -- those large format printers. I don't know if he would have liked the digital printing in comparison to his darkroom silver prints.

So I guess what it really comes down to is he would have loved the control of digital, but I don't believe the quality is quite yet. Or perhaps it is and I just can't afford it.

This article was a giant advertisement

"So, Ansel Adams, yeah, I think he'd love it,' LoPinto said.

End of story, begin ad copy.

And that leads to the hypothetical question, which Nikon digital camera would Ansel Adams use?

"Considering his typical tendency to use high-quality, large-format cameras and his desire that it be handy and convenient, I suspect he would be attracted to our D100, for its size and versatility and overall digital image quality."

And it goes on and on like that. Gross. If I wanted advertisements posing as stories I'd go read Gamespy reviews.

Always a place for older artforms

There are still folk shooting on Super8 film. There are folk that still edit using 3/4 videotape. There are artists that record using 1950's 4-track recorders.

There will always be a place for these older technologies. Even if the mainstream has passed them by, the great artist will find themselves drawn to one form over another, even if it is not the latest nor the greatest. I recall one photographer that still shoots using glass frames over film. I know of many independent movies shot on Super8 or even 16mm film, when several studios are shifting away from 35mm to digital or IMAX technology. These forms will not just up and dissapear, they will always be there. An anacronism, perhaps, but one to be cherished even today.

Hmmm

Ansel Adams was an expert at manipulating images in a way that made them look more natural, and never artificial. That said, outdoor photographers are only recently getting into digital film and the progress has been very slow.

Ansel Adams would not have adopted digital film, yet. Look at a full print of one of his photos. They were amazingly sharp. The man loved detail like no other. Digital photography does not yet provide the level of detail that Adams would have required.

Similarly todays outdoor photographers still commonly use large and medium format cameras using (in the case of color) films like Fuji Velvia (RVP 50), etc. These films deliver, IMO, a level of saturation that digital has yet to produce. It is close, but not there. Professional digital systems are beautiful, but in my opinion do not deliver the beauty of a professional analog print.

That said, some professionals are very good at what they do and their pictures rival the film pictures of the other 98% of us.

-Sean

8x10 digital camera backs, maybe

Most of Adams' great work comes from view cameras. If digital handhelds (i.e. 35mm-like) were available which gave him the same resolution and control as film, he'd definitely play with them. However, until someone comes up with a digital film backplate for a large format view camera, there are many things than can't be done in the digital arena.

Moreover, I suspect he'd look at digital in the same way he did colour. He spent much of his career in a love/hate relationship with colour film and printing, and a good part of that is that he never had the time to get as proficient with it as he wanted (or considered necessary).

For fine art, digital is still in its pre-infancy--Daguerrotypes were a more able medium in many ways. In fact, one of the major differences between film and digital is that from almost day one, film has been capable of capturing depth and detail on a level that digital isn't even close to.

Nonetheless, Adams would be carrying and using digital for some things right now, and mercilessly riding the manufacturers to improve the technology. For fine art though, I don't see it for at least another half decade.

Ansel Adams Used a Great Many Formats.

Here's a quote from a film made not only when Adams was alive, but during the time he was still doing good, vibrant work. It is a good assesment of the arsenal that Ansel used to create his photographs, and it is reasonable to extrapolate that he would have used digital gear were he working today, though not exclusively. Despite the assertations of many amateur photographers, film size does exceed that of 35mm and medium format, and it is from the large formats that acutance unavailable to digital, 35mm and medium format is to be had.

View, for example, Monolith, The Face of Half Dome [coolantarctica.com] in person and of a print that Adams himself made, and you see a tonality and level of detail that modern science has yet to be able to create digitally, at least in a form available to a consumer. That is not to say that it cannot or will not be done, because in my opinion it is a matter of time before digital surpasses ANY film. Nevertheless, that day is still in the future, at least in regards to a piece of 4X5 or 8X10 sheet film.

Beaumont Newhall narrated Larry Dawson's 1957 film, Ansel Adams, Photographer, and described Adams's photographic gear:

"...A fine craftsman employs different tools for different purposes. Item: one 8 x 10 view camera, 20 holders, 4 lenses -- 1 Cooke Convertible, 1 ten-inch Wide Field Ektar, 1 9-inch Dagor, one 6-3/4-inch Wollensak wide angle. Item: one 7 x 17 special panorama camera with a Protar 13-1/2-inch lens and five holders. Item: one 4 x 5 view camera, 6 lenses -- 12-inch Collinear, 8-1/2 Apo[chromatic] Lentar, 9-1/4 Apo[chromatic] Tessar, 4-inch Wide Field Ektar, Dallmeyer [...] telephoto.

"Item: One Hasselblad camera outfit with 38, 60, 80, 135, & 200 millimeter lenses. Item: One Koniflex 35 millimeter camera. Item: 2 Polaroid cameras. Item: 3 exposure meters. One SEI, and two Westons -- in case he drops one.

"Item: Filters for each camera. K1, K2, minus blue, G, X1, A, C5 &B, F, 85B, 85C, light balancing, series 81 and 82. Two tripods: one light, one heavy. Lens brush, stopwatch, level, thermometer, focusing magnifier, focusing cloth, hyperlight strobe portrait outfit, 200 feet of cable, special storage box for film.

[Ansel's car (a Cadillac) with platform pulls away from camera.]

"Item: One ancient, eight-passenger limousine with 5 x 9-foot camera platform on top."

Who cares if Ansel Adams would go digital!

He is dead. His work is art history now. Don't get me wrong, as a former photographer, a university level computer based art teacher, and large museum, I respect his work.

The simple truth is that he was a product of his time and that time was glass and emulsion. Yes thats right, glass. He started out shooting as someone who has hung Ansel Adams work in a photos on glass plates. Later he changed technologies and shot on the flexible film we all use today. Ultimately his time has past.

Were Ansel Adams alive today he might be creating art in code as many of us are doing now. He might be working with neural nets or a network of wifi nodes and location aware technology.

One might just as pointlessly ponder whether or not he would be producing Marxist institutional critique or gender based work.

To suggest that he would like digital photography is pointless. If he were alive today producing the same work he did in the 40's (no matter how beautiful) in any format we would say he was irrelevant and anachronistic.

Next up... Raphael loves Photoshop, Rembrandt digs Python and the Bauhaus goes over to OSX.


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Comments from a professional

The goal is to sell images. Would he have used a digital camera? Of course. It's a great way to preview a shot, kinda how photographers used to carry a polaroid. But keep in mind that people value things that are unique (hence limited-edition prints, hand-made items, etc). Each of Ansel's prints was unique, and could not be duplicated, which adds to the value. So, for final prints, they'd probably still be on film.

For people currently learning to shoot, go with digital. It's a much better way to learn. My father (who used to teach at Nikon School) says he would have learned to shoot in 1/4 the time.

I think Ansel would have loved digital!

I was fortunate enough to meet Ansel Adams before he died. He was a wonderful and most unpretentious man. Contrary to much that has been written about him, he was not this high priest that some made him out to be. Ansel Adams spent much of his working life as a commercial photographer, and a documentary film of him late in his life showed that he liked conveniences as much as anyone else.

In fact, the film showed him walking out of his darkroom with a test strip, tearing it off along the edge of a table and microwaving the photo (yes, microwaving it!) to get it to dry faster. Given some of the results I have seen in the hands of talented photographers who have worked hard in digital, I have a feeling Mr. Adams would have gotten behind it too.

One final thought: many of you have talked about 35mm size digital cameras as being the high end of digital photography. NOT TRUE. There are any number of high-end makers of extremely high resolution camera backs for medium format and large format cameras, including view cameras like the 4X5" Sinar. These are the staple of many advertising photo studios today. Please know that in many cases, the CCD (and most likely, CMOS) backs do not have the same size image area as the film they replace, and consequently, the lens focal length is changed. But Sinar, for example, offer a set of view camera lenses specifically or digital photography, and there are battery-powered digital backs for medium and large-format cameras for location use and nature photography. In fact, these have been around for at least 5 years.

In short, never say never. I don't think Ansel ever did.

He would have loved the digital cameras but..

The problem he would have had would have bin in how to print his pictures. There are no printers that can match a good platinum photo paper. And even if you could get some kind of digital enlarger to do the printing process the gradation curve of digital images looks different from that of photographic films and the match between photographic paper and the digital negative would have bin much harder.
And mathing image, negative and print was what the zone system that ansel adamsn developed and used was good for.
So I suppose he would have used old fashioned photographic processes after all.

This is not to say that digital photography have no value. Most photographers doesn't have the time or assistants to produce the fine quality prints like Ansel Adams did for his exhibitions, and for them digigal photograpy is j
ust fine.