Thursday, September 13, 2018

September Dawn


... Back in the excellent Photoclub (Naestved, Denmark) I attended as a teen, some were deeply into Ansel Adams’ “Zone System” of exposure. I was a complex system of making sure that your photo had tones all the way from black to white, but still had detail all over. As a major voice in the club said about it: “it can almost make you stop photographing altogether.” (Of course it was much harder to control contrast with film.) 

And indeed I have found it important to remember that as Adams said, the Zone System is a teaching tool, not an artistic tool. Once one has learned to control tones, then one is free to make other choices. For example I have found that sometimes blocks of pure black without detail is much more expressive than the Technically Correct way.
(Granted, I didn’t have much choice in this case, but sometimes I’ve had.)


... Aha, I found some of those pictures where I went Dark:





(Canon 5D2, 24mm F:1.4, set at 8.0 and ISO 640. 

4 comments:

Joe Dick said...

I didn't think Denmark got that much snow.

Russ said...

The Ansel Adam's Zone System had a lot to do with the fact that he was part of Group f/64.

From wikipedia:
f/64 was formed in opposition to the pictorialist photographic style that had dominated much of the early 20th century, but moreover, they wanted to promote a new modernist aesthetic that was based on precisely exposed images of natural forms and found objects.

For the pictorialist, a photograph, like a painting, drawing or engraving, was a way of projecting an emotional intent into the viewer's realm of imagination.
-------

I guessing that a pictorialist would care less about a sharp or precisely exposed image and care more about whether it conveyed the artistic intent.


Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Exactly.
And I’m caught sqarely between the two, uncomfortably!

Vihar Kurama said...

This was great to rread