Couple thoughts on this. 1) As it is with most any photographer, Ansel's work spanned the gamut from okay to phenomenal. Even when a photographer carefully curates the imagery of theirs that they present to the world, there are invariably pieces that are much stronger than others. 2) It's also important to consider that landscape photography is undeniably an artform built upon historical tradition and evolution. So much about Ansel's landscape work... his locations, his tonal mastery, his compositional intuition, his sensitivity to the nuance of a moment... were arguably groundbreaking in his era. His work represented the pinnacle of the genre at that time... it was the most stirring direction that landscape art was being taken. And he was so influential in so much that came afterwards that his stylistic influences became ubiquitous. The argument that "it shouldn't be about anything but the image itself... nothing else" ignores the fact that we're looking back on these images from our modern era with sensibilities that have been transformed by his influence. And for that matter, our sensitivity to its brilliance has been dulled by decades worth of copycats. We've consequently grown jaded to the magic. Send somebody up on a mountain road through the Tetons for the first time and they'll be awestruck, and rightfully so. Send them that way on their drive to work every morning for years and you'd be surprised how fast their ability to appreciate that beauty dwindles as it becomes part of the routine, so to speak... part of the background noise. 3) I think that some of his photographs (not all, but some) still hold up very well even now with artistic sensibilities that feel very modern... and that's saying so very much when you consider that some of his most prolific times were 80-90 years ago. You'd be hard-pressed to find much landscape work from that era that comes anywhere close to what he was producing, and the fact that some of it STILL holds strong even now as these works are creeping towards being a century old is really pretty extraordinary. Anyhow, definitely an enjoyable video, guys!
Personally I liked this video and think that it was really entertaining to watch. Keep going especially with Mike as guest it is very enjoyable to watch.
I'm glad you brought up the music comparison. Its the same. There are 5 year old girls that play like Eddie Van Halen and Jimi Hendrix, but that will never take those guys out of legend status, because, as you mentioned about Ansel.....They were the ones to "invent" that.......Copying is easy, being truly original is VERY very hard...and getting harder.
The Zone System was a way of controlling the exposure through carefully metering and processing the film to either expand or compress the tones so the negative can be printed to its highest tonal range. Ansel Adams did a lot of dodging and burning as well. He equated the negative to a musical score and the print to be the performance. The ability to manipulate the pixels in a modern digital image gives photographers much more control than anyone ever had with film. But it also can lead to a lazy approach to photography. A friend of mine went on vacation and his wife shot 5800 images in a week. Were any of them even close to something that would get three stars on Fstoppers? No.
This was a great episode, totally agree that the IG has made photography ubiquitous in addition to cheapening the value of photography. The truth is we as photographers have let it happen, In the narcissistic quest for likes, we allowed ourselves to photography beautiful people without pay because we can post. We allowed those models to use our images for free under the label of trade for portfolio. The person in the photo is what gets the likes and simply more likes equals more T and A, it's almost never about the photographer. Sorry for the tangent, yes this was a good watch really appreciated it.
the thing about the zone system is that it´s not only about recovering highlights or being able to pull up the blacks, which is what most people do when editing digital. It´s more about being able to control where exactly you place these different zones on the final print regardless of what they actually were "in real life". This is especially important for the midtones (which most people tend to forget when editing digital) -- you can almost always notice this on Angel Adams prints - that the midtone greys are divided out very smoothly into differnt shades of grey. Like the image of Mesa Verde (@15:50)and the image of the canyon view shot from above (@12:45)
Well done. TOtally agree with why Ansel is who he is. Of course today there are better images being produced. Lots to be said for discovering adding shadows in a dark room with coffee grounds back in the day.
Your conclusion is so right, so true and at the same time so sad. Don't get me wrong, it was fun attending your video. But you made the point as you talked about the value. Also I agree on your comparison of music and photography. I've been myself at the Horseshoe Bend three years ago. We camped very close to that spot, walked there before sunrise and there were already as many other people as if it was the Black Friday sale.
I feel like many people haven't actually experienced what a 4x5 or larger negative scan or print looks like. It is very difficult to replicate the tones and you will not match the level of detail and information contained in that negative.
@@chrisogrady28 Ben Horne has a great video that was shared on fstoppers where he goes over a 709 megapixel 8x10 sheet film that was drum scanned. The phase one is impressive that it doesn't have bayers interpolation but a lot of digital cameras resolution is artificially raised with interpolation.
@@jessieschultz-wilson339 I agree.. A few of the comments along the lines of "surely film cant be that sharp, have that much detail" etc.. A fine grain film in a large format camera will still produce better resolution that pretty much any digital file from any sensor. There is a different feel to it, a digital can look "cleaner" - but the detail and sharpness in especially 8x10 is really immense.
@@JoshPricePlus It's all about enlargement ratios. If you're making an 8x10 contact print, your lens can be 1/8 as sharp, in terms of line pairs per millimeter, as a lens on a FF camera and wind up with the same resolution when you view the FF image at 8x10, because all of the blur in that FF image has been enlarged by a factor of 8.47X. If the lens on the 8x10 camera is even half as sharp as the lens on the FF camera, the result will be over four times as sharp when both are viewed at the same size.
While looking at the Ansel Adams works you need to consider what he and the rest of the Group f/64 were doing at the same time. And, you need to talk about Edward Weston and how he built the stage for the Group. Try finding the prints that Adams, Weston and others made. You will be blown away at the strength of work they are. A favorite of mine are the peppers Weston shot over time.
I’m new to photography but picked Ansell Adam’s work Everly every time 😂. To me it was very obvious the way he used light and the contrast of his photographs that made them very recognisable, also the darker skies. I just feel they all have a certain mood. I think what this shows is the more experience we have in any medium the more we are likely to over complicate things.
You said you picked Ansell's work every time but did you also think many of the FStoppers' photos were Ansell too? For example, if I said EVERY photo was Ansell I would get every Ansell correct but also every FStoppers' photos wrong and my percentage correct wouldn't be good. I'm not trying to embarrass you or anything but I'm just curious to know if your knowledge is what helped. Btw, I'm not a photographer so this is very interesting to me and that's why I'm curious.
Adams printing style changed over time. A good example is Moon over Hernendez I have seen 3 different versions of the photo. Also the film he used change also because film and paper older stock went out of production. He also went from 8x10 to 4x5 after WWII then to Hasselblad later in his life. All these factors effected the final print.
It's THE photo that made Ansel Adams into ANSEL ADAMS in so many different ways! It's when he first noticed that he could conceive of what a print could look like, that was different from what his eye saw, before he took the shot. It's also the first shot that got him noticed by anyone that mattered in the establishment of his early career.
The one with the river fooled me because I thought Ansel Adams used longer exposures and couldn't freeze the rapids in the water. I scored a little better, but I've searched out a lot of his work and recognized them from memory. I don't have Instagram, so I haven't seen your stuff there.
I don’t understand the long exposure thing. I’d assume he would still have short exposures because Hernandez has a sharp moon and you know the moon moves fast when low on the horizon. Does he have any water shots with motion blurred? -P
@@FStoppers "Moonrise, Hernandez, NM" was exposed for one second, according to Adams' own recollection. He used a Wratten 15-G yellow filter, 64 speed film, at f/64. (f/64 for 8x10 roughly equates to f/8 for the 135 (FF) format in terms of depth of field.)
Enjoyable guys. Great way to showcase Adams' work tbh. Seems he had a very telltale preference for wanting small slivers of sky in a lot of his shots. You should do this with various famous photographers ... Annie Leibowitz next.
I thought I'd comment to say that I'm not a photographer but really enjoyed this video. The thing that was great for me as a non-photographer aside from seeing the photographs was hearing each of you explain your reasoning for your answers. Just hearing Ansell or FStoppers didn't really help much. Hopefully this comment will help you guys for future videos. Btw, I'm subscribing because this was very cool. Maybe I'll buy a camera and take some classes. :)
Really? Even if large format is better, it has to be only by a stop or two max. Is medium format film able to show more than 12-14 stops of light? It surely isn’t sharper than digital that’s for dang sure. -P
@@FStoppers Only on the highlight side. Digital is only able to resolve what 2 stops in the highlights on avg. from most 35mm cameras. A 14 to 15 stop digital video camera has 5 stops (Cinema cameras have +8) in the highlights and 7 to 8 stops in the shadows. (I gotta look at the FX9 again but Arri and Red you're only getting +5 stops (+8 from Arri) of overexposure back). Where as film and it depends on what you believe is acceptable, but you could pull 2 to 3 stops of underexposure and 10 to 12 stops in overexposure for 35mm depending on the film, lens and scanner (on avg. 8 to 14 stops). But move to medium format, that's giving you 17+ (35mm Tri-X 17 stops of DNR) stops of dynamic range. Move to Large Format and you're beyond. Digital kills Color film in dynamic range and is way better in shadow recovery especially in low light conditions. Film is on the opposite side and simply can't handle color the same way digital can but it has way more latitude in the highlights to recover overexposure than digital. Digital has no chance in the highlights compared to film in recovery. The big cinema cameras are the closest I've seen to film. In a practicle sense digital is better but not if a $200k Arri Alexa to get +8 stops from the highlights and +8 stops from shadows is your only option. 35mm digital stills cameras barely get over 10 stops of dynamic range regardless of marketing hype. Only the R5, A7RIII, Pentax 645z, Lumix S1R and D850 have gotten close to 12 stops that I know of in 35mm. The medium format digital cameras are at or above 12 to 13 stops. But let marketing tell you omg the A7c has 15 stops of dynamic range and very well may but where at on the scale... I'm no expert guys, maybe you should test it. Get the guy over at Photonstophotos, someone who own a Large Format camera like Ken Rockwell, a medium format film camera and find Potato Jet to see about an Arri Alexa idk.
Ansel does have some dead giveaways but its mostly in his style. A keen observer will notice just how much he is dodging and burning in his lightroom to get very specific values and local contrast and he is very preferential to certain focal lengths and compositions. However the very fact that even some of these are too hard to tell just goes to show both the impact he still has on photographers today and also how we put some older artists on a pedestal. But you also have to consider just how much he was able to do with the technology of the day which is still incredible
nice observation! may be we can't tell the difference because modern photographers were influenced by Ansel so much that they unconsciously copy his style?
When Ansel started shooting in Yosemite, the mountain tops were close to the top edge of the frame, in portrait orientation, to let viewers feel the size of the big walls that fascinated him. The older Ansel got, the lower the horizon sank in favor of a big, sometimes very dramatic sky, a more spiritual interpretation of being human on earth. Instead of leaving it at the surprise about the big white cumulus cloud, Patrick might have clarified this. Instead of just guessing around two times where the historic ruin under the big wall is, Patrick could have enlightened that it is the White House Ruin at Canyon de Chelly. At least you could have added the information as text in the video afterwards. It's OK if dramatic contrasts, dark skies and extramundane interpretations of landscape are not your cup of tea, especially not Lee's, but Ansel's work would still have deserved the respect of clarifying facts.
I agree with the Fstoppers crew. I am not a huge fan of Ansel. That doesn't take away from what he contributed to photography, and helped photography get to where it is. But styles change, technology changes and people change. I do like some of his stuff, but most looks too flat or too contrasty to me. One extreme or another. Granted, I have only seen one Ansel print in person, and it was pretty awesome. But most of what people see are scanned on old technology, so that may be part of it. Great videos, keep them coming.
Don't listen to the haters. Judging famous photos blind isn't easy, esp on a bad display. I really enjoyed the discussion at the end, would love to hear more.
As a side note, getting a little more than half of them right does not mean you are a little better than average at identifying Ansel Adams photographs. It means you did a little better than guessing randomly.
The film can produce quite sharp images, sir ;). Sometimes I put a 50 or 100 ISO B&W film into my (film) Nikon F100, which was an analogue equivalent of D780 or so, and the photos are as sharp as from my D750 (for film, I use the same Nikkor primes - labelled G AF-S ED N etc. - that I use for my DSLRs). And the final resolution of prints is similar. With less sensitive films (like 25 ISO) , the results from F100 are comparable to my D810 - you can enlarge photos at least to A1 size. If I needed something even larger, I would use my Rolleicord or Zeiss Superikonta (6x6).
Video recommendation for FStoppers: 5 most sought after vintage lenses (leica lenses excluded) adapted on full frame digital cameras and do a photoshop with those 5 lenses (b&w & color)! Posible locations on PR: Coloso Old Sugar Mill or Old San Juan
There's an interesting discussion about how spotify affects how music sounds just from their pricing model. Spotify pays out proportionally to the number of times a song is played, where a play means that someone listened to it for more than 30 seconds. This incentivizes artists to make shorter songs that have some sort of catchy hook at the beginning. I wonder if there's an analogue to that with instagram and photography.
Of course, instagram boosts photography with crazy colors, contrast, wide-angle crazy dynamic, big foreground element and eye-catching leading lines from foreground towards mountain horizon. Minimalistic photography, which takes time from the viewer is lost
@@TatzkaTube I agree that's definitely an instagram look, but I'm curious what mechanism results in that kind of outcome. Do you think it's just that the images are typically viewed on small phone screens, or is there more to it?
I don't think this was dumb at all, totally agree with Patrick's comments about Instagram ruining photography by making it more common place and cheapening the art from. Also totally agree with your thoughts on Ansel Adams, photographers with today's technology and ease of location access can easily take as good or better photographs as Ansel, not taking anything away from Ansel, in his time he was one of the best. This video gets 👍👍
Ansel Adams was at least a "good" photographer if not a great one. Where he excelled was in the darkroom where he scientifically tested every available combination of paper, developer, and film to achieve his results, combined with expert technique at manipulating darkroom tools . He was a master print maker if not a master shutterbug.
When you look at Ansel's photography keep in mind he shot on an 8x10 camera, he prepared his his own plates and processed in a darkroom. Not easy, a lot of trial and error and experimentation. Also his photos can be enlarged to wall size. I really enjoyed playing along with this and the previous Ansel video.
True, My best IMAGES are when I hiked in 27 miles with my 2.25 X 2.25 FILM cameras and printed them on 20' X 24" paper. ... But then again, I studied under the last Darkroom assistant to AA, in the 80's
I completely agree with the conclusion, Ansel was a pioneer and it doesn't matter if somebody takes "better" photographs after him; there's an intrinsic value on being the first doing something.
It's one thing not to know if a photo is Ansel's or not. It's another thing to bash Ansel's works and say things like "I don't think the photographer put a lot of work in the composition" lol, just saying😂
So much of art is subjective. As mentioned, being first, being first to do something different (even if it's weird or sucks) and salesmanship, all play a role in how art is perceived. I could never understand the Appeal of Robert Mapplethorpe for example. And as for Adams, composition wise, some of his images are not the best in my opinion. All of that said, where Adams excelled was with The Zone System. He understood that light meters read for medium grey and figured out how to expose film to maximize dynamic range in post processing (in addition to dodging and burning in the darkroom). That was really his genius. He also used a lot of large format cameras. This allowed him to make prints that few people at the time were able to create.
I had a chance to meet Ansel at his home for some wine and discuss photography just myself and my friend in 1974. I went on a date instead. But I was 17 at the time and I had other things on my mind. : - (...................that didn't work out either.
You guys should do a show on Peter Beard (a friend of mine), his diary photos, which he adds etchings etc. to. Peter gave me an elephant pic he inscribed in 1986 and is now worth $28,000. You can't 'fake' a Beard, by the way. He was in another class as a true artist.
A lot of the Fstoppers images were "over-degraded." It's especially obvious at 5:23 where the lack of details would not have been acceptable to Ansel. IMHO.
Unacceptable to Ansel, however, this is 2020 and when they try to find digital versions of Ansels images to use on a youtube show, they will frequently not be able to find high resolution images to use, completely negating that issue. I mean, you can try to find high resolution images of rare Ansel prints, but they are not out there for a reason, or else everyone would have a costco print ANsel hanging in their living room.
So basically Patrick tried his best to find the best copy cats of modern day that has years to learn and still Ansel Adam can be differentiated on sub level displays.
I completely agree with Patrick; the convenience has cheapened the medium. But I'm totally ok with that : I love that I can spend 30mn scrolling on Instagram and discover tens of objectively amazing photos, new talents, and lots of different takes on a same subject. I'd get bored very fast if I only had my work to look at. I like that anyone can show its work; one could say that it is unfair that "average" photographer get more attention than extremely talented ones, but how fair was it only very established professional photographer could publish their work or even exhibit it ? Was that fair to amateurs who loved taking photos and would have loved to show them outside their family circle ?
"Slightly better then average"...:D no, you were just slightly better then mindless random guessing, which is somehow much worse. But I was annoyed the most about the general ignorance of film quality. The quality you're thinking of mostly comes from cheap 35mm camera and "inverse nostalgia". But if you go to the medium format, the quality comes on par to a pretty good digital camera. And if you go large format like most of Adams's work, the quality is not even in the same ballpark. You just cannot choose the sample of Adams's work from the quadruple recompressed stuff ripped from a forum post made in the year 2000. Also, regarding the zone system. It is a technique for managing two variables - exposure and contrast. The zone system technique was developed to take the tonal range of the subject and capture it as effectively and economically onto a film medium as possible. Basically being aware of the shadows and highlights of a scene and stretching/compressing it to the full extent of the film exposure latitude. It is also inherently tied to an analog photography. You cannot do a zone system on a digital by its very nature. That is not to say that you cannot control exposure and contrast on a digital - you can, but with a different set of techniques. Not with zone system.
This kinda reminds me of the bulls..t associated with some Leica shooters who seem to think photographers using these cameras are on a higher level than everyone else, (as obviously are their photographs:).
And some modern photographers using their $3000+ digital cameras think they are automatically on a higher level than Ansel A. or any other "film" photographer from the past.
I personally never liked Ansel over new stuff, I do however realize how hard it was to do what he did on the technology of his time. His value is what he had to learn to do to get the images he got. Now any modern DX or FF DSLR can reproduce the results in 1/50 the time it took Ansel. That is why it is hard to tell who made what. Compare images made pre 1990 and Ansel likely wins them all, but add in 2010-2020 and modern cameras, and it gets real fuzzy to tell the difference. There are family cars made today that are faster than super cars made in the 90's. The same is true of Photography.
The quality of photography as an art is not pegged to technological advancements, and I’ll take a ‘sloppy’ Robert Frank over most anything pushed out today. There are still folks making great photos with pinholes and tin types. This said, on a technical level, compare an original Adams’ print to any current inkjet offering, and the reactions among viewers are not going to be conclusive like they would be with the measurable performance of an automobile. Aesthetics doesn’t work that way. After all, you can listen to two modern high-end audio setups (with each totaling US$100,000 for example), and you’ll hear two different ‘signatures’ despite both systems having excellent measurements. And if the song sucks, who cares about the system. Or look at it another way; are pianos or oil paints now rendered incapable of reproducing worthwhile art because they are supposedly antiquated mediums? But besides all that, I don’t think people appreciate how much resolution and tonal subtlety large format film cameras are capable of producing. But that’s the ‘technical’ aspect. What people seem to often overlook is that Adams' created an original visual style, and this is his “value”, not on how hard he had to work for it. If people can replicate this now, easily or not, doesn’t negate his creative accomplishments. To be sure, whether one likes his work or not is a matter of personal preference (you can’t please ‘em all), but his influential contribution to photography is incontestable. And no, I have never seen any current landscape photography that makes me go, “wow, this is so much better than Adams’, if only he had this or that digital camera 80 years ago.” On the contrary…
@@sjones1017 um, no. Medium format Film has dynamic range of around 14 stops, the same or slightly less than currant top DSLR's. There is nothing technical or special about Ansel's photos that cannot be created today. His style can also be created. His work is great becasue he got those results when no one else could. It is possible with modern cameras to get those results so technically his work is not better than today. High end audio is my thing, you cannot tell the difference in $100K systems unless maybe the source material is perfect, the two systems are designed to highlight different areas, and you are under 30 years old. You lose enough hearing by 30 that a 50K system sounds no worse than a 100K system. I competed in competitions all thru my teens and 20's. I also sold and built some expensive high end setups. Mainly, I hung out at a very high end place in Columbia, SC that sells 20K-100K pairs of speakers and both Tube and Solid State amps that weight 50 pounds and cost 20K and up. I built systems to have a flat curve and flat was flat for the most part. I am not an Ansel hater, I am just being honest about how he compares to what can be done today. He is a pioneer in photography for what he was able to do, ( in his time ) his work is not so special compared to what can be today to make him revered like some sort of god. Painting is a completely different thing.
What's awkward here though is that you keep referring to Ansel Adams as Ansel Adam. Even this video title seems to indicate you don't realize his name is Ansel Adams.
Carleton Watkins. Look him up. Ansel copied all of his work at Yosemite. Watkins photographed Yosemite before Ansel was born. I also do wet collodion photography and it makes film dozens of times easier and convenient.
You should do a Peter Lik prank. He took photos from Australia and other places in his early years that would easily get a 2 star rating on fstoppers because it is blue skies, no sunset or sunrise, quite basic compositions. Those would definitely fool you guys against classic fstoppers members photos.
“Ansel would have never done that”
“Oh my god, I know nothing”
Pretty much summarizes the whole video.
Love this series.
Couple thoughts on this. 1) As it is with most any photographer, Ansel's work spanned the gamut from okay to phenomenal. Even when a photographer carefully curates the imagery of theirs that they present to the world, there are invariably pieces that are much stronger than others. 2) It's also important to consider that landscape photography is undeniably an artform built upon historical tradition and evolution. So much about Ansel's landscape work... his locations, his tonal mastery, his compositional intuition, his sensitivity to the nuance of a moment... were arguably groundbreaking in his era. His work represented the pinnacle of the genre at that time... it was the most stirring direction that landscape art was being taken. And he was so influential in so much that came afterwards that his stylistic influences became ubiquitous. The argument that "it shouldn't be about anything but the image itself... nothing else" ignores the fact that we're looking back on these images from our modern era with sensibilities that have been transformed by his influence. And for that matter, our sensitivity to its brilliance has been dulled by decades worth of copycats. We've consequently grown jaded to the magic. Send somebody up on a mountain road through the Tetons for the first time and they'll be awestruck, and rightfully so. Send them that way on their drive to work every morning for years and you'd be surprised how fast their ability to appreciate that beauty dwindles as it becomes part of the routine, so to speak... part of the background noise. 3) I think that some of his photographs (not all, but some) still hold up very well even now with artistic sensibilities that feel very modern... and that's saying so very much when you consider that some of his most prolific times were 80-90 years ago. You'd be hard-pressed to find much landscape work from that era that comes anywhere close to what he was producing, and the fact that some of it STILL holds strong even now as these works are creeping towards being a century old is really pretty extraordinary. Anyhow, definitely an enjoyable video, guys!
Mike adds a ton of value to these. Love his perspective.
Personally I liked this video and think that it was really entertaining to watch. Keep going especially with Mike as guest it is very enjoyable to watch.
I agree. I love mike’s presence
+1 from me. Mike adds so much value here as he does with all videos he’s in.
I'm glad you brought up the music comparison. Its the same. There are 5 year old girls that play like Eddie Van Halen and Jimi Hendrix, but that will never take those guys out of legend status, because, as you mentioned about Ansel.....They were the ones to "invent" that.......Copying is easy, being truly original is VERY very hard...and getting harder.
So many people can play Eddie better than Eddie but they sure as heck haven’t written all that amazing material. -P
I found a couple Ansel Adams orginal snapshots in my grandpas belongings. Pretty awesome find.
I think the key to a lot of those images was that red or yellow filter look the sky had. Ansel loved his filters!
Sounds like mike has been spending every waking moment since the last time on how to pick out an Ansel piece. 😉
The Zone System was a way of controlling the exposure through carefully metering and processing the film to either expand or compress the tones so the negative can be printed to its highest tonal range. Ansel Adams did a lot of dodging and burning as well. He equated the negative to a musical score and the print to be the performance. The ability to manipulate the pixels in a modern digital image gives photographers much more control than anyone ever had with film. But it also can lead to a lazy approach to photography. A friend of mine went on vacation and his wife shot 5800 images in a week. Were any of them even close to something that would get three stars on Fstoppers? No.
This was a great episode, totally agree that the IG has made photography ubiquitous in addition to cheapening the value of photography. The truth is we as photographers have let it happen, In the narcissistic quest for likes, we allowed ourselves to photography beautiful people without pay because we can post. We allowed those models to use our images for free under the label of trade for portfolio. The person in the photo is what gets the likes and simply more likes equals more T and A, it's almost never about the photographer. Sorry for the tangent, yes this was a good watch really appreciated it.
Lee's logic is so funny - "I like this too much - so it is Fstoppers!" :)
Just what I needed right now, thanks for the great entertainment 👌🏻
I would love to see more videos like this with different photographers. It was fun to watch :)
the thing about the zone system is that it´s not only about recovering highlights or being able to pull up the blacks, which is what most people do when editing digital. It´s more about being able to control where exactly you place these different zones on the final print regardless of what they actually were "in real life". This is especially important for the midtones (which most people tend to forget when editing digital) -- you can almost always notice this on Angel Adams prints - that the midtone greys are divided out very smoothly into differnt shades of grey. Like the image of Mesa Verde (@15:50)and the image of the canyon view shot from above (@12:45)
Loved this. Sure would like to hear some more Ritz Camera stories too.
"the convenience factor has cheapened the medium itself" -- that´s a very good way to put it and I´ll keep that quote in mind.
Well done. TOtally agree with why Ansel is who he is. Of course today there are better images being produced. Lots to be said for discovering adding shadows in a dark room with coffee grounds back in the day.
Your conclusion is so right, so true and at the same time so sad. Don't get me wrong, it was fun attending your video. But you made the point as you talked about the value. Also I agree on your comparison of music and photography. I've been myself at the Horseshoe Bend three years ago. We camped very close to that spot, walked there before sunrise and there were already as many other people as if it was the Black Friday sale.
These vids with mike are great. Loved it
I feel like many people haven't actually experienced what a 4x5 or larger negative scan or print looks like. It is very difficult to replicate the tones and you will not match the level of detail and information contained in that negative.
Even with a 100MP 16 bit PhaseOne sensor?
@@chrisogrady28 Ben Horne has a great video that was shared on fstoppers where he goes over a 709 megapixel 8x10 sheet film that was drum scanned. The phase one is impressive that it doesn't have bayers interpolation but a lot of digital cameras resolution is artificially raised with interpolation.
@@jessieschultz-wilson339 I agree.. A few of the comments along the lines of "surely film cant be that sharp, have that much detail" etc.. A fine grain film in a large format camera will still produce better resolution that pretty much any digital file from any sensor. There is a different feel to it, a digital can look "cleaner" - but the detail and sharpness in especially 8x10 is really immense.
@@chrisogrady28 The Phase One can capture it. The problem is that even our high end 10-bit monitors can't display it.
@@JoshPricePlus It's all about enlargement ratios. If you're making an 8x10 contact print, your lens can be 1/8 as sharp, in terms of line pairs per millimeter, as a lens on a FF camera and wind up with the same resolution when you view the FF image at 8x10, because all of the blur in that FF image has been enlarged by a factor of 8.47X. If the lens on the 8x10 camera is even half as sharp as the lens on the FF camera, the result will be over four times as sharp when both are viewed at the same size.
While looking at the Ansel Adams works you need to consider what he and the rest of the Group f/64 were doing at the same time. And, you need to talk about Edward Weston and how he built the stage for the Group. Try finding the prints that Adams, Weston and others made. You will be blown away at the strength of work they are. A favorite of mine are the peppers Weston shot over time.
I’m new to photography but picked Ansell Adam’s work Everly every time 😂. To me it was very obvious the way he used light and the contrast of his photographs that made them very recognisable, also the darker skies. I just feel they all have a certain mood. I think what this shows is the more experience we have in any medium the more we are likely to over complicate things.
You said you picked Ansell's work every time but did you also think many of the FStoppers' photos were Ansell too? For example, if I said EVERY photo was Ansell I would get every Ansell correct but also every FStoppers' photos wrong and my percentage correct wouldn't be good. I'm not trying to embarrass you or anything but I'm just curious to know if your knowledge is what helped. Btw, I'm not a photographer so this is very interesting to me and that's why I'm curious.
Really enjoyed watching this, thank you guys.
Adams printing style changed over time. A good example is Moon over Hernendez I have seen 3 different versions of the photo. Also the film he used change also because film and paper older stock went out of production. He also went from 8x10 to 4x5 after WWII then to Hasselblad later in his life. All these factors effected the final print.
Lee ? you still there :-D
Wow the turns have really tabled
Wait….seriously? 11:53? And people had to think?? That photograph is one of Adams’ most famous and people had to think?
It's THE photo that made Ansel Adams into ANSEL ADAMS in so many different ways!
It's when he first noticed that he could conceive of what a print could look like, that was different from what his eye saw, before he took the shot.
It's also the first shot that got him noticed by anyone that mattered in the establishment of his early career.
The one with the river fooled me because I thought Ansel Adams used longer exposures and couldn't freeze the rapids in the water. I scored a little better, but I've searched out a lot of his work and recognized them from memory. I don't have Instagram, so I haven't seen your stuff there.
I don’t understand the long exposure thing. I’d assume he would still have short exposures because Hernandez has a sharp moon and you know the moon moves fast when low on the horizon. Does he have any water shots with motion blurred? -P
@@FStoppers "Moonrise, Hernandez, NM" was exposed for one second, according to Adams' own recollection. He used a Wratten 15-G yellow filter, 64 speed film, at f/64. (f/64 for 8x10 roughly equates to f/8 for the 135 (FF) format in terms of depth of field.)
Enjoyable guys. Great way to showcase Adams' work tbh. Seems he had a very telltale preference for wanting small slivers of sky in a lot of his shots. You should do this with various famous photographers ... Annie Leibowitz next.
I feel like Mike has a refined language for my thought process. Enjoy getting other people’s thought process.
Great vid. I think 66% is a good ratio. Liked the music on the lead out. You could do Ann Leibovitz next. Maybe with Peter?
I thought I'd comment to say that I'm not a photographer but really enjoyed this video. The thing that was great for me as a non-photographer aside from seeing the photographs was hearing each of you explain your reasoning for your answers. Just hearing Ansell or FStoppers didn't really help much. Hopefully this comment will help you guys for future videos. Btw, I'm subscribing because this was very cool. Maybe I'll buy a camera and take some classes. :)
No way current digital cameras are surpassing Large Format in dynamic range, not even remotely close.
Really? Even if large format is better, it has to be only by a stop or two max. Is medium format film able to show more than 12-14 stops of light? It surely isn’t sharper than digital that’s for dang sure. -P
@@FStoppers Only on the highlight side. Digital is only able to resolve what 2 stops in the highlights on avg. from most 35mm cameras. A 14 to 15 stop digital video camera has 5 stops (Cinema cameras have +8) in the highlights and 7 to 8 stops in the shadows. (I gotta look at the FX9 again but Arri and Red you're only getting +5 stops (+8 from Arri) of overexposure back). Where as film and it depends on what you believe is acceptable, but you could pull 2 to 3 stops of underexposure and 10 to 12 stops in overexposure for 35mm depending on the film, lens and scanner (on avg. 8 to 14 stops). But move to medium format, that's giving you 17+ (35mm Tri-X 17 stops of DNR) stops of dynamic range. Move to Large Format and you're beyond.
Digital kills Color film in dynamic range and is way better in shadow recovery especially in low light conditions.
Film is on the opposite side and simply can't handle color the same way digital can but it has way more latitude in the highlights to recover overexposure than digital. Digital has no chance in the highlights compared to film in recovery. The big cinema cameras are the closest I've seen to film. In a practicle sense digital is better but not if a $200k Arri Alexa to get +8 stops from the highlights and +8 stops from shadows is your only option. 35mm digital stills cameras barely get over 10 stops of dynamic range regardless of marketing hype. Only the R5, A7RIII, Pentax 645z, Lumix S1R and D850 have gotten close to 12 stops that I know of in 35mm. The medium format digital cameras are at or above 12 to 13 stops. But let marketing tell you omg the A7c has 15 stops of dynamic range and very well may but where at on the scale...
I'm no expert guys, maybe you should test it. Get the guy over at Photonstophotos, someone who own a Large Format camera like Ken Rockwell, a medium format film camera and find Potato Jet to see about an Arri Alexa idk.
Ansel does have some dead giveaways but its mostly in his style. A keen observer will notice just how much he is dodging and burning in his lightroom to get very specific values and local contrast and he is very preferential to certain focal lengths and compositions. However the very fact that even some of these are too hard to tell just goes to show both the impact he still has on photographers today and also how we put some older artists on a pedestal. But you also have to consider just how much he was able to do with the technology of the day which is still incredible
nice observation! may be we can't tell the difference because modern photographers were influenced by Ansel so much that they unconsciously copy his style?
Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Arizona....the pueblo photo you liked.
When Ansel started shooting in Yosemite, the mountain tops were close to the top edge of the frame, in portrait orientation, to let viewers feel the size of the big walls that fascinated him. The older Ansel got, the lower the horizon sank in favor of a big, sometimes very dramatic sky, a more spiritual interpretation of being human on earth.
Instead of leaving it at the surprise about the big white cumulus cloud, Patrick might have clarified this. Instead of just guessing around two times where the historic ruin under the big wall is, Patrick could have enlightened that it is the White House Ruin at Canyon de Chelly. At least you could have added the information as text in the video afterwards.
It's OK if dramatic contrasts, dark skies and extramundane interpretations of landscape are not your cup of tea, especially not Lee's, but Ansel's work would still have deserved the respect of clarifying facts.
I agree with the Fstoppers crew. I am not a huge fan of Ansel. That doesn't take away from what he contributed to photography, and helped photography get to where it is. But styles change, technology changes and people change. I do like some of his stuff, but most looks too flat or too contrasty to me. One extreme or another. Granted, I have only seen one Ansel print in person, and it was pretty awesome. But most of what people see are scanned on old technology, so that may be part of it. Great videos, keep them coming.
When AI can generate any image your imagination can dream up, we will look at all contemporary artists and photographers as lame and not very good.
They're coming for Peter Lik next haha
"faaar ooooveeeer" ... the misty mountains ... mike have good references
Another great vid. True statements at the end too.
Don't listen to the haters. Judging famous photos blind isn't easy, esp on a bad display.
I really enjoyed the discussion at the end, would love to hear more.
All these new videos with Mike. When does his new fstoppers tutorial video come out?
Eventually -P
wow acdsee has come a long way
Thought lee retired? Why’s he still here?
As a side note, getting a little more than half of them right does not mean you are a little better than average at identifying Ansel Adams photographs. It means you did a little better than guessing randomly.
The film can produce quite sharp images, sir ;). Sometimes I put a 50 or 100 ISO B&W film into my (film) Nikon F100, which was an analogue equivalent of D780 or so, and the photos are as sharp as from my D750 (for film, I use the same Nikkor primes - labelled G AF-S ED N etc. - that I use for my DSLRs). And the final resolution of prints is similar. With less sensitive films (like 25 ISO) , the results from F100 are comparable to my D810 - you can enlarge photos at least to A1 size. If I needed something even larger, I would use my Rolleicord or Zeiss Superikonta (6x6).
I think the pueblo-looking pic was of "Mesa Verdi" in Colorado: Anasazi Indian ruins. Beautiful spot if you haven’t been.
It's the White House Ruin at Canyon de Chelly in Arizona, taken in 1941. Possibly taken on the same weeks long trip as "Moonrise, Hernandez."
@@michaelclark9762 Looks like I need to go there too! Thanks for the tip.
Sebastião Salgado is a fantastic photographer to do another challenge like that. I've never seen B&W images like his.
The aspect ratio is enough of a giveaway to get most of these right.
Video recommendation for FStoppers: 5 most sought after vintage lenses (leica lenses excluded) adapted on full frame digital cameras and do a photoshop with those 5 lenses (b&w & color)! Posible locations on PR: Coloso Old Sugar Mill or Old San Juan
I liked this. I too tried to guess, applied all the "rules" I think I know, and then when it said "ANSEL", it blew my mind.
The Indian pueblo was Canyon de Chelly. One fron the rim of the canyon and other in the canyon.
There's an interesting discussion about how spotify affects how music sounds just from their pricing model. Spotify pays out proportionally to the number of times a song is played, where a play means that someone listened to it for more than 30 seconds. This incentivizes artists to make shorter songs that have some sort of catchy hook at the beginning. I wonder if there's an analogue to that with instagram and photography.
SPOILER: there is.
Of course, instagram boosts photography with crazy colors, contrast, wide-angle crazy dynamic, big foreground element and eye-catching leading lines from foreground towards mountain horizon. Minimalistic photography, which takes time from the viewer is lost
@@TatzkaTube I agree that's definitely an instagram look, but I'm curious what mechanism results in that kind of outcome. Do you think it's just that the images are typically viewed on small phone screens, or is there more to it?
I don't think this was dumb at all, totally agree with Patrick's comments about Instagram ruining photography by making it more common place and cheapening the art from. Also totally agree with your thoughts on Ansel Adams, photographers with today's technology and ease of location access can easily take as good or better photographs as Ansel, not taking anything away from Ansel, in his time he was one of the best. This video gets 👍👍
Ansel Adams was at least a "good" photographer if not a great one. Where he excelled was in the darkroom where he scientifically tested every available combination of paper, developer, and film to achieve his results, combined with expert technique at manipulating darkroom tools . He was a master print maker if not a master shutterbug.
4:5 images seem to be Ansel images predominantly in both videos
When you look at Ansel's photography keep in mind he shot on an 8x10 camera, he prepared his his own plates and processed in a darkroom. Not easy, a lot of trial and error and experimentation. Also his photos can be enlarged to wall size.
I really enjoyed playing along with this and the previous Ansel video.
He used 8x10, 4x5, Hasselblad 6x6, 135, and Polaroid. Not everything he shot was on LF.
Little tip: Whoever is ahead on points, should be the first one to call.
True, My best IMAGES are when I hiked in 27 miles with my 2.25 X 2.25 FILM cameras
and printed them on 20' X 24" paper. ...
But then again, I studied under the last Darkroom assistant to AA, in the 80's
The one of the creek/river way the lest like AA. there was no details in the trees and the rock in the river... but it was AA then it was..?
Fstoppers rocks
I completely agree with the conclusion, Ansel was a pioneer and it doesn't matter if somebody takes "better" photographs after him; there's an intrinsic value on being the first doing something.
He wasn't the first; Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, William Henry Jackson, George Fiske and many others.
wait lee didnt retire???
typical politician!
@@mikekelley i knw right
Holy shit but when Mike said “come on!” at 3:44, I died. His expression killed me for some reason
Great Video!!
Instagram photographers seems to be going back to Fan Ho and Saul Leiter style. I wanna see the next type of videos like these to cover them
Fan ho?
@@dominicpersichetti6340 lol yes thats what i meant to type
Yeah, I'm a fan of Tatsuo Suzuki. I really like his street photography. Not exactly like the staged stuff Fan Ho did, but very similar to Saul Leiter.
The "pueblo" shot --> Anasazi.
It's one thing not to know if a photo is Ansel's or not. It's another thing to bash Ansel's works and say things like "I don't think the photographer put a lot of work in the composition" lol, just saying😂
Happy new year very nice video
I got 14/18.. Do I work for Fstoppers now?
So much of art is subjective. As mentioned, being first, being first to do something different (even if it's weird or sucks) and salesmanship, all play a role in how art is perceived. I could never understand the Appeal of Robert Mapplethorpe for example. And as for Adams, composition wise, some of his images are not the best in my opinion. All of that said, where Adams excelled was with The Zone System. He understood that light meters read for medium grey and figured out how to expose film to maximize dynamic range in post processing (in addition to dodging and burning in the darkroom). That was really his genius. He also used a lot of large format cameras. This allowed him to make prints that few people at the time were able to create.
I had a chance to meet Ansel at his home for some wine and discuss photography just myself and my friend in 1974. I went on a date instead. But I was 17 at the time and I had other things on my mind. : - (...................that didn't work out either.
Gotta agree with Mike, it's kinda useless to watch Ansel Adams shots on a screen. The big print is such a big part of the whole deal with Ansel.
You guys should do a show on Peter Beard (a friend of mine), his diary photos, which he adds etchings etc. to. Peter gave me an elephant pic he inscribed in 1986 and is now worth $28,000. You can't 'fake' a Beard, by the way. He was in another class as a true artist.
28'000 where? Gallery
"The turns have tabled" haha 😅😂🤣
A lot of the Fstoppers images were "over-degraded." It's especially obvious at 5:23 where the lack of details would not have been acceptable to Ansel. IMHO.
Unacceptable to Ansel, however, this is 2020 and when they try to find digital versions of Ansels images to use on a youtube show, they will frequently not be able to find high resolution images to use, completely negating that issue.
I mean, you can try to find high resolution images of rare Ansel prints, but they are not out there for a reason, or else everyone would have a costco print ANsel hanging in their living room.
Mike, don't leave them! :)
Great idea. I love this game
So basically Patrick tried his best to find the best copy cats of modern day that has years to learn and still Ansel Adam can be differentiated on sub level displays.
That “aerial” shot is of the Grand Canyon. It’s not aerial. It’s near a platform
A large format photo will kill *any* digital camera several times over in any regard. Especially WRT resolution.
Adams shot all hours of the day. He often shot at f/64 or other small apertures, and with slow fllm.
I completely agree with Patrick; the convenience has cheapened the medium. But I'm totally ok with that : I love that I can spend 30mn scrolling on Instagram and discover tens of objectively amazing photos, new talents, and lots of different takes on a same subject. I'd get bored very fast if I only had my work to look at. I like that anyone can show its work; one could say that it is unfair that "average" photographer get more attention than extremely talented ones, but how fair was it only very established professional photographer could publish their work or even exhibit it ? Was that fair to amateurs who loved taking photos and would have loved to show them outside their family circle ?
"Slightly better then average"...:D no, you were just slightly better then mindless random guessing, which is somehow much worse. But I was annoyed the most about the general ignorance of film quality. The quality you're thinking of mostly comes from cheap 35mm camera and "inverse nostalgia". But if you go to the medium format, the quality comes on par to a pretty good digital camera. And if you go large format like most of Adams's work, the quality is not even in the same ballpark. You just cannot choose the sample of Adams's work from the quadruple recompressed stuff ripped from a forum post made in the year 2000.
Also, regarding the zone system. It is a technique for managing two variables - exposure and contrast. The zone system technique was developed to take the tonal range of the subject and capture it as effectively and economically onto a film medium as possible. Basically being aware of the shadows and highlights of a scene and stretching/compressing it to the full extent of the film exposure latitude. It is also inherently tied to an analog photography. You cannot do a zone system on a digital by its very nature. That is not to say that you cannot control exposure and contrast on a digital - you can, but with a different set of techniques. Not with zone system.
Good one, guys.
This kinda reminds me of the bulls..t associated with some Leica shooters who seem to think photographers using these cameras are on a higher level than everyone else, (as obviously are their photographs:).
And some modern photographers using their $3000+ digital cameras think they are automatically on a higher level than Ansel A. or any other "film" photographer from the past.
The detail in the shadows are a dead giveaway of digital.
I say that. But also got some of these wrong 😂
I personally never liked Ansel over new stuff, I do however realize how hard it was to do what he did on the technology of his time. His value is what he had to learn to do to get the images he got. Now any modern DX or FF DSLR can reproduce the results in 1/50 the time it took Ansel. That is why it is hard to tell who made what. Compare images made pre 1990 and Ansel likely wins them all, but add in 2010-2020 and modern cameras, and it gets real fuzzy to tell the difference. There are family cars made today that are faster than super cars made in the 90's. The same is true of Photography.
The quality of photography as an art is not pegged to technological advancements, and I’ll take a ‘sloppy’ Robert Frank over most anything pushed out today. There are still folks making great photos with pinholes and tin types. This said, on a technical level, compare an original Adams’ print to any current inkjet offering, and the reactions among viewers are not going to be conclusive like they would be with the measurable performance of an automobile. Aesthetics doesn’t work that way. After all, you can listen to two modern high-end audio setups (with each totaling US$100,000 for example), and you’ll hear two different ‘signatures’ despite both systems having excellent measurements. And if the song sucks, who cares about the system. Or look at it another way; are pianos or oil paints now rendered incapable of reproducing worthwhile art because they are supposedly antiquated mediums? But besides all that, I don’t think people appreciate how much resolution and tonal subtlety large format film cameras are capable of producing. But that’s the ‘technical’ aspect. What people seem to often overlook is that Adams' created an original visual style, and this is his “value”, not on how hard he had to work for it. If people can replicate this now, easily or not, doesn’t negate his creative accomplishments. To be sure, whether one likes his work or not is a matter of personal preference (you can’t please ‘em all), but his influential contribution to photography is incontestable. And no, I have never seen any current landscape photography that makes me go, “wow, this is so much better than Adams’, if only he had this or that digital camera 80 years ago.” On the contrary…
@@sjones1017 um, no. Medium format Film has dynamic range of around 14 stops, the same or slightly less than currant top DSLR's. There is nothing technical or special about Ansel's photos that cannot be created today. His style can also be created. His work is great becasue he got those results when no one else could. It is possible with modern cameras to get those results so technically his work is not better than today. High end audio is my thing, you cannot tell the difference in $100K systems unless maybe the source material is perfect, the two systems are designed to highlight different areas, and you are under 30 years old. You lose enough hearing by 30 that a 50K system sounds no worse than a 100K system. I competed in competitions all thru my teens and 20's. I also sold and built some expensive high end setups. Mainly, I hung out at a very high end place in Columbia, SC that sells 20K-100K pairs of speakers and both Tube and Solid State amps that weight 50 pounds and cost 20K and up. I built systems to have a flat curve and flat was flat for the most part. I am not an Ansel hater, I am just being honest about how he compares to what can be done today. He is a pioneer in photography for what he was able to do, ( in his time ) his work is not so special compared to what can be today to make him revered like some sort of god. Painting is a completely different thing.
I'd like to see more this. Blind criticism with some random pros mixed in.
Git boring
I was going to say its more what he had to use as camera kit than been the first to do it. old film was bad enough if you hadnt got a light meter.
What I learned today? Expertise is just an illusion of knowledge
God, too ,any ads..
What's awkward here though is that you keep referring to Ansel Adams as Ansel Adam. Even this video title seems to indicate you don't realize his name is Ansel Adams.
Is it supposed to look like there is a real window behind them?
Yes, because it is a real window 🤷🏻♂️-P
Carleton Watkins. Look him up. Ansel copied all of his work at Yosemite. Watkins photographed Yosemite before Ansel was born. I also do wet collodion photography and it makes film dozens of times easier and convenient.
Did the test too, got two pics wrong. Both of these times I though: fstoppers pic! But wasn't :D But hey, only two wrong.
Lee put down the phone man cmon.
isn't he just counting?
@@leehaa303 Ahh, fair enough. Sorry man, that's my trigger. I never pull out my phone in public unless its a message from Mike Kelley
You should do a Peter Lik prank. He took photos from Australia and other places in his early years that would easily get a 2 star rating on fstoppers because it is blue skies, no sunset or sunrise, quite basic compositions. Those would definitely fool you guys against classic fstoppers members photos.
why was lee always on his phone? not really nice
He was keeping score -P
I was wondering that too. He looked totally distracted.
Ansel never shot wide and his skies were always dark, just an FYI for the next time :)