In Search of Ansel Adams

We went on a short rain soaked trip to the west coast of Scotland last week and despite the rain I was able to get a lot of photography done in very challenging light conditions.

Those that have been following my YouTube channel will be aware that I’ve been talking a lot about the Ansel Adams Zone system with the aim of seeing how effectively it maps onto digital photography.

For those who haven’t seen the videos, I’ll recap.

Ansel Adams

Ansel Adams was a renowned American photographer active between the 1920’s and his death in 1984. He is well known for his black and white landscape photography, largely of mountains but often including seascapes and even still life. I’ve always appreciated the results of his processing and recently began to seriously investigate the zone system myself.

The problem Adams was trying to resolve was that of creating an exposure on film that would survive processing and print a high fidelity output. This is arguably a lot more difficult in the days of film and print than it is in the modern day of digital and social media. A particular issue he tried to resolve was that pure white, prints as no ink, creating the illusion of a hole in a photographic print. Pure black manifests as an ugly blob of black ink!

Adams needed his exposures to come in somewhere between pure black and pure white so that some detail would survive across the entire spectrum. To this end he defined 11 Zones ranging from pure black to pure white.

By mapping this system to what he saw in front of him, he was able to consistently expose his pictures for the shadows, saving shadow detail (important in film) and protecting the highlights. This is the Zone System.

In digital photography with modern sensors we are faced with a different problem, we have to protect the highlights because it is not possible to pull detail from a blown out highlight. It is much easier to recover detail from dark areas of the picture.

The concept of “Tones” in color photography is essentially a matter of density. A tone in any single color is a function of the luminance applied to that color. In black and white this equates to a grey scale ranging through dark tones, mid tones and light tones.

Some people maintain that there is no connection, that because of the difference in technology there is no point in trying to map this system onto a digital world but I’m pretty sure I disagree.

Where Adam’s technique and digital photography overlap is in his concept of visualisation. Driven by a need to “see” the image in black and white, Adams learned how to mentally map tonal characteristics onto a greyscale. This of course meant that he was literally thinking about how the picture would present, once processed.

My argument is that this act of “deliberation” is healthy in terms of digital photography. It is the difference between a pro who can repeat his work reliably and an amateur who “sprays and prays”.

If we go out with deliberation we often open the door to producing better pictures because the deliberation feeds our choices (and boy, do we have a lot of choices!).

Take for example this image.

I had the idea to create this style of image before I went out to the location. The choices it helped me to make were to underexpose the land and to rely on the reflected light to give me enough detail in the water.

By force of habit I would have lifted the foreground and probably merged three or more bracketed exposures but the result would have been horrible. This image has mystery and atmosphere. It captures what I saw and what I felt, in front of me.

A little bit later, as the dawn broke I took this photograph.

The choices here were again driven by my vision of what the image should look like. I knew it would feature blue tones and that the yellow lichens would contrast nicely with that. In order to balance the shot effectively I had to accept that the sun itself would be blown out. I did try bracketing this shot, but the result was not nearly as atmospheric.

Neither of these photographs obey the rules we learn as beginners. Both are rich in atmosphere and I contend that the technical flaws do not impact the resonance of the images.

We are blessed with a lot more choice that Adams although that didn’t prevent him from making multiple prints out of single exposures. We have techniques such as focus stacking and exposure bracketing to bring to bear on our photography and while some argue that it is precisely this that makes Adam’s process irrelevant to digital, I say that it is a parallel process. Different technology but same results.

This image for example was composited from five different exposures made on a tripod with identical settings but different focal points. In this way I was able to get sharp focus from front to back. I focused on the lichens at the extreme front of the image, the orange rocks crossing the diagonal, the last rocks in the first triangle, the separated rocks on the top third and the distant cloud formation. It’s not my favourite picture but it is a good example of the power of focus stacking. In this picture you’ll notice the highlights have not been over exposed.

I think this shoot persuaded me that fixating on a process to find perfect exposure in digital is a losing bet. There may be no such process without bracketing. The best we can hope to achieve is to accurately represent our highlights and everything else will fall into place. If the blacks are still crushed, we need to make a choice, to bracket or not to bracket. That doesn’t mean we’re throwing away the Adams playbook, we’re simply making a creative choice.

This shoot was successful in that it produced several portfolio worthy images and it reinforced what had been a rather vague presumption that deliberation can be a powerful way of easing the decision making process. Too much choice can be a distraction!

If you’ve found this interesting then check out my post on Black and White Landscape Photography