Would Ansel Adams have gone digital....?

[AndyMan 7]

Stolen blatantly from slashdot:

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."

Bias of the nikon exec selling his new camera not withstanding, interesting read.

_Am

__

You put the fun in "funnel" - craichead.

[freekflyguy 0]

Ansel who???

I wonder if these guys use digital?

http://www.davidbaileyphotography.com/index.html

http://www.kinho.com/famous/famLitch.html

Bailey currently advertises the Canon Ixus Digital, Litchfield is related to someone who lives in a big house in London.

Buzz

It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice.

[quade 4]

Quote

If Ansel Adams, one of the most famous photographers of the 20th century, was still alive, would have he gone digital?

Difficult to really even begin to ponder the question and also a little presumptuous to think you might "know" the answer.

A bit like asking if Georges-Pierre Seurat would have switched over to acrylic paints.

Sometimes an artist likes a particular medium. In the case of Adams, he's not really known for his color work, but clearly color film existed at the time. He instead worked mostly in large format black and white and often not exposing more than a single frame of it in an entire day of waiting for the light to be "perfect", so to make the leap to say he would have or not switched over to digital is, as I said before, a bit presumptuous.

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

[fasterfaller 0]

I think Ansel would be more amazed by the digital darkroom than digital cameras . Ansel was a great photographer but his greatest skills were in the darkroom .

[murrays 0]

In the introduction of the book "Photoshop Elements 2 Solutions" author Mikkel Aaland writes: "Ten years ago I wrote a book titled "Digital Photography". The book was dedicated in part to the great photographer, Ansel Adams, who introduced me to digital photography in 1980."

That's all he says but it indicates that Adams obviously was contemplating the possibilities or even using early digital cameras years before digital photography and inexpensive computing power were widely available. He died in 1984, well before digital photography reached the masses.

I did a few Google searches to see if I could find more about Adams and digital photography but didn't find anything worthwhile.

--
Murray

"No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

[Zenister 0]

Quote

Quote

If Ansel Adams, one of the most famous photographers of the 20th century, was still alive, would have he gone digital?

Difficult to really even begin to ponder the question and also a little presumptuous to think you might "know" the answer.

A bit like asking if Georges-Pierre Seurat would have switched over to acrylic paints.

Sometimes an artist likes a particular medium. In the case of Adams, he's not really known for his color work, but clearly color film existed at the time. He instead worked mostly in large format black and white and often not exposing more than a single frame of it in an entire day of waiting for the light to be "perfect", so to make the leap to say he would have or not switched over to digital is, as I said before, a bit presumptuous.

not necessarily, while much has been made of his 'zen' of the perfect shot, he was also equally likely to take hundreds of proofs to examine the conditions necessary to get that 'single shot' not to mention the number of failed prints he left on the dark room floor

IMO his method of work seems to definitively indicate he would have loved digital cameras (and darkrooms) simply for the ease of use and in expense.

the end effect of acrylic vs oil is so significantly different that the comparison isnt valid, for photography we are rapidly approaching the point where there is little difference in quality between digital and wet and as the final product is far more important than the process to most artists, why would AA care? So long as it achieved the desired effect?

one of the defining differences between and artist and a technician = is the focus on the process or the completed work?

____________________________________
Those who fail to learn from the past are simply Doomed.