Based on an interview I saw but cannot find he found digital photography fascinating anf if you have read his camera negatine and print books I believe he would use photoshopI wonder what Ansel Adam's would have made of photoshop?
Based on an interview I saw but cannot find he found digital photography fascinating anf if you have read his camera negatine and print books I believe he would use photoshopI wonder what Ansel Adam's would have made of photoshop?
I was for a while a professional photographer, but nowadays it is just a hobby, however seeing Wayland's pictures it makes me weep. I wonder what Ansel Adam's would have made of photoshop?
He would have seen it as the culmination of his theory and practice made possible for the masses.
dead on, i think.
adams painted with light.
when you read his books you realize the magic came after the shot.
a lesson most photographers should take to heart.
especially with high res cameras (the enormous number of pixels available) you can take an everyman's "kodak moment" and edit it into art.
all the tools adams used and more are available to you in even the most rudimentary editing software.
the one thing that either you have inside you or must learn is compostion.
whether it's the simple application of thirds or something more sophisticated.
a picture is just a snapshot without some tension.
within reason the camera you use doesn't make the shot work, it's the eye (and mind) behind it.
one of the least-inspired shooters i ever met won an amateur contest with one of his landscapes (the picture actually was excellent).
he was proud but he said he'd taken thousands of pictures and this was the only one anybody liked.
i said, so...this one makes all the rest worth the work.
the truth is he was always enjoying himself.
what's wrong with that?
The world is full of pictures that don't need any setting up.
I'm a hobbyist. I took an evening course in photography and image editing a while back and that piqued my interest. I don't kid myself that I have an especial gift for it, but I do enjoy it.
One of these days I'll need to get myself a better camera. I bought the best one I could afford (a Fuji S8000fd), but being a "bridge camera" it is neither one thing nor another. It is too big for a compact, and not high performance enough for an SLR. In retrospect I wish I had bought something like a Canon Powershot G12. A good camera, but still compact enough to take bush-crafting, hiking and cycling with me.
The dynamic range on the Fuji isn't great for one thing. Normally on a photo like that one, the sky would be washed out, or the glen massively underexposed. The above image is actually several shots I stitched into a poor man's HDR image using layer masks (well "faked" layer masks in Photoshop Elements, but that's another story). You can see the joins around the tree branches if you look closely. Getting the snow cap distinct from the sky was quite challenging in post hoc editing.
The Fuji also doesn't shoot in RAW which is frustrating, only JPEG.
And it is a muckle huge thing, but without enough features to justify the bulk. For example the maximum exposure time only goes up to 4 seconds. The Canon I had my eye on goes up to 15 seconds. I fancied trying my hand at "light art".
But for now it is certainly not a bad camera by any stretch. A better camera would however allow me to make my pictures more like what I see with my eyes without needing so much editing after the fact. The above image is pretty accurate to how Glen Clova looked that day, but that is not what the unedited photos my camera produced looked like. They needed some work to make them an accurate record of the Glen that day.
Although I definitely turned the saturation up a tad high
I have two digital cameras in the repair shop at the moment, both well treated, both with unexpected electronic problems.
One is repairable (New shutter assembly, 90000 actuations short of expected shutter life) the other not (Main board gone, spares not available).
I never, ever had a film camera that needed fixing for no discernible reason and I have to say I'm not very happy.