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Ansel Adams was one of the reasons I took up photography, and I read his trio of Negative, Camera, Print books back in the early 80's... I need to reread them, it's been a while.
I've been editing some of my old color images of Yosemite into black and white over the past few weeks and did a search on youtube for Ansel Adams videos because I wanted to see how many photographers talked about photographing b/w in the style of Adams that actually mention gray scale and the zone system. Not very many. We can always count on you to be thorough!!
Alex, your black and white images are so much stronger. There’s a moodiness, a vibe about them that is emotionally provocative. Thanks for another thoughtful video!
Adams used a spot meter. He would pre-visualize the desired result in his mind's eye and then measure the brightness range and expose a sheet of film according to the range (zones). He would then process the film and give increased development time for a low contrast scene and shorter development time for a high contrast (over exposed) scene. He would also use different grades of paper to increase or reduce contrast. It's difficult to replicate the zone system on a digital sensor because it behaves differently from film and is more like transparency film. Thanks for the video.
@@Adrian-wd4rn The tonal range of 4x5 inch film is not the same as a digital capture, not yet. Black and white film has a huge latitude which is quite forgiving when overexposed. Adams exploited this to the max, the Dmax, ho ho.
I think this is some of the most useful and profound videos on how to create rich B&W images. Because digital makes transformations to B&W so quickly it’s easy to overlook all the additional work you can do to further enhance monochrome images. When necessary giving each part of an image it’s own tonal treatment by applying masks of varying levels, curves and contrast as well as burning & dodging will go a long way to achieving that goal.
Hi Alex, I may not have commented on your channel before, but I love what you are doing here, your channel is refreshingly not about kit or kit reviews but more about photography itself, the thought process, the vision and the execution of creating a great photograph. This is such a refreshing approach that not many communicate, well done!
1:13 … thank you! I get so tired of creative people, especially “successful” creative people saying it’s the journey, not the destination that matters! Hell with that! I want the print! I want that destination! 😊
I never got very good at dodging and burning in the darkroom, but I have invested a lot of time in learning every possible method to accomplish it in Photoshop; not just for black and white, either.
Not only are your videos so informative and thought-provoking, they continually inspire me to grab my camera and get out and take photos. Thank you, for the serious time and effort you put into freely sharing your knowledge and experience with us.
I remember seeing an Adams exhibition at a gallery in San Francisco in the early 1990's. As I sat in the middle of the room, I noticed that his photo "Clearing Winter Storm" was to my right. As I looked from right to left, I saw that directly opposite "Clearing.." was another totally different looking image but it quickly became obvious that the camera was in almost exactly the same place as "Clearing...". The two images brought to light totally different aspects of the same landscape. That is what "pre-visualization" is all about. Ansel Adams showed me what good b/w photos could look like back in 1978. BUT it was the subject matter of the early photojournalists like HCB, Capa and the like that inspired me to shoot. Eventually, just after I turned 50, I left my engineering position to make it as a newspaper shooter. It lasted for 10 wonderful years before the print industry collapsed. Also the use of filters is why I still shoot RAW and use Silver Efex filters to see the changes to an image.
Some great tips as always! I have found some big benefits by shooting in monochrome raw and revert to colour in post. This turns the viewfinder to monochrome and has aided my exposure, composition, focus accuracy and attention to shadows. I sometimes found the colour to overwhelming/ distracting through a viewfinder.
+1 this idea. I was at a photo conference at a botanical garden last year, and on the last day, I set my camera to monochrome as an exercise in stripping away distracting color and focusing on line, tones, shadow, light, texture, etc. It was fabulous fun and a great learning experience.
I’ve had these three books for about 35 years, but haven’t opened them in a long time. I just started perusing The Camera again a few days ago. Even though the term “camera” means something quite different from Adam’s time the explanations and illustrations regarding how light behaves, optics, planes of focus, apertures and the rest are all really well done and very useful still. If I were to teach beginning photography I would reference this book a lot. Time to review the other two volumes. 🙏👏👏👏
Fun fact: If you look at the three prints of Adams' El Cap photo, you'll notice the first shows a little more of the top of the cliff, while the other two are slightly more tightly cropped. This is because the negative was damaged in a fire at Adams' studio, forcing him to trim the damaged edge from the negative.
A few years back I saw a Ansel Adams exhibit in Tucson it was a small exhibit But so good.it had his final prints but also a print out of camera plus the negative and the OOC print was flat but after the darkroom magic it was unbelievable. They also had written instructions for his students to print showing what areas andhow long to dodge and burn,it was the best AA exhibit I've ever seen
Excellent! I love what you do Alex. I used to shoot black and white and enjoy all of the qualities that metering, time of day, tonality, filters and lens character bring to image capture. Choice of film stock, what speed rating to use for the conditions, where to focus and how to maintain details in key areas of the negative. Which developer and dilution. What paper to use and what differential exposure techniques. It takes a lot of artisanal and technical brainpower to land a print from a great negative. It was good seeing Ansel Adams talking about the human factor in making prints because that’s how it feels to make a photograph, it’s an art.
It would be helpful to show Ansel's notes for the prints he made to make the idea you present clear to everyone. This will give you a deeper understanding of the photographic process. The explanation of the grey scale concept needs to be clarified. The idea is to choose where you want the mid-tone grey zone to fall. Then, if necessary, use a filter to help guide your proposed image toward your concept. Also keep a record of how you exposed and processed your photo. It is important to create a record of the complete process used to create your completed image
Excellent material! There are lots of fairly good photography channels on TH-cam, but I don't know anyone else having as much passion for photography as you do.
When I first got started in photography back on the 80s, I of course loved AA's work. As my taste evolved and changed over the years I don't really like the majority of his work anymore, although I still enjoy some. I find much of his work to be too heavy handed/exaggerated. His employment of the RED filter makes the skys so dark the photos look more like moonscapes to me rather than landscapes. I 10000% respect his contribution to the medium of photography, a giant on the art world and he was a wonderful person too.
A Wratten #90 filter is great for visualizing in monochrome when you come upon a scene and you want to get an idea of what it might look like in B&W. That’s what Ansel Adams used.
I'm at a point in my photographic journey where I am only seeking out preconceived images. It provides an excellent sense of purpose and goal, whenever setting out to shoot.
Very cool video. I worked in a Pro lab of black and white as a kid. It was an awesome education that I never appreciated for the longest time. We printed b/w for fine art photographers as well as commercial headshots. The skill of the printers has been lost in the digital age where no one prints b/w anymore.
My Grandpa inspired me to take up photography at an early age and some years later as a teen I remember giving him a book of Ansel Adams photos. I am a beginning adult piano student so maybe the music will inspire me to create some proper B&W snaps that please me at the least. Ta very much.
I own two of those Ansel Adams books and they are a wealth of helpful information. Of course black and white isn't just about desaturation. It starts from the moment you go out with your camera and are looking for subjects with a decent amount of tonal variation. Thankfully with editing software like Capture One which I use, there is a black and white tool with sliders for various colours that does the job a colour filter would have done in the film days but with the advantage of being able to lighten or darken multiple colours (tones in black and white) instead of just the one with a filter.
Photographic B&W filter ( broadband pass ) do not work anything like the sliders in the digital software, much like those ridiculous ' film emulation ' presets. The effect of a filter is much more subtle as it also lightens some colours as well as darkening the complimentary colours. Usually a photographer can spot the manipulated digital photo from a mile away, due to the very harsh end results. If you do use these sliders then their use has to be highly judicious.
@@lensman5762 If someone shoots digital photography and wants to produce a b&w image then they will need to use tools like the colour sliders in order to edit specific tones and add contrast to the photo. Yes it’s very easy to go over the top which is why people need to be subtle with the editing. I don’t necessary find the contrast in b&w film photographs always pleasing. Also I never go near any film emulation tools/presets, especially film grain as they never look authentic. I just accept my photos are digital and do the best I can with the edit.
Thank you for your continued output of inspiring and thought-provoking videos, Alex. I'm consistently lifted up and encouraged to learn more as I continue to encounter the work of the great artists who've come before. On a recent trip to the US, I visited a used book store and found both The Negative and The Print, first editions (though not 1st printing), to complement my copy of The Camera. They were ten dollars each. I sat on the floor among the bookshelves in silent, teary-eyed disbelief at my good fortune.
Another great video thankyou, Ive been a fan of Sebastiao Salgado forever, he has an amazing documentary about his journey but his photographs are amazing, not only that but he's an environmentalist. Mr Salgado has been an inspiration in my work, thankyou again
A great book Ansel wrote was about his 20 or so best images. One of my faves is “moonrise, Hernandez New Mexico” (the moon is rising above a graveyard in the distance.) the story of that one really stuck with me. It was hurriedly captured on the way back from a lousy day of shooting with no good images. He saw it through the car windshield, stopped the car and rapidly setup and took the shot.
If you are a fan of Ansel's works, don't forget to check his assistants works too: John Sexton, Alan Ross, etc. They are also fine printers. I really like John Sexton's Places of Power.
So it looks like creating my ideal B&W photo is not determining the correct zone to shot at but rather creating a final product that is a mix of highlights and shadows that will draw in the eye and create an exciting composition whose appeal is log lasting.
Love this, thanks. Was just having this problem with a black and white photo. It's a still life, and I'm lacking a good lighting set up at the moment. I didn't even know Ansel Adams had written books!
thinking in mono is very different than real life color, which I like, I have the habit, without a camera, to look at a scene and try to find the brighest part and then the darkest part, sqinting can help. Also, some sofware (silver fx) have 10 zones of b&w, you can click on say zone 5 and it will show on the image. keep up the good work Alex, and yes zone 0 is pure black😊
These mini-seminars on photographic technique are really valuable, and this is the format that you excel in. Brilliantly researched, and thoughtfully presented. Fantastic!!
Love this video. I cannot work in the dark room now but I still shoot in black and white with my manual cameras. Over the years, I am seventy-five now, my emotions have changed, I have changed and my. subject matter has changed. I have read all three of Adam's books and studied with one od his students. Yet, I found out how difficult the process could be as paper disappeared from the market, film disappeared or became way too expensive. The Zone System testing is done for every film, with each of the lenses that you used was exceedingly time consuming but worth it if you had the time. I do not know if Ansel Adams would have switched to a digital darkroom but he might have. You are correct in that you need to know what you want in the end product and again, that change is okay. Get there as close as you can and make the changes over time with the energy and resources you have. Thank you.
I draw now - with graphite and charcoals - but before that I was semi-pro shooting shows, festivals and the odd bit of press work - and no matter how much colour work I did, I always found time to try the images as b&w. I was definitely inspired by AA and HCB as a child and nowdays I always look at any image as a b&w before I even consider it as a colour image - and I never draw in colour - itks too complicated and it just feels wrong. I’ve also been known to say that ‘Colour is the last refuge of those who can’t handle b&w!’
So Eggleston just couldn’t handle shooting in B&W? 😅 You know it’s not a competition. One thing isn’t better than the other thing. Color describes. B&W is an abstraction. That’s all there is to it.
Wonderful episode and thanks Alex. I have these ideas in my head of what I'd like to create, but have yet to learn the digital tools and techniques to experiment and then present them them
Honestly, I think the most fun way to shoot black and white is infrared. 720nm or 850nm specifically. With enough sunlight and a blue enough sky, you'll get those black or nearly black skies, but all of the foliage in your shots and most of the people in it and their clothes will be _bright_ white. Cloudy day? Still not an issue. It'll either be nearly indistinguishable from any other black and white photo and be pretty good for it, or you'll still have the same bright white tones from organic matter and clothing but with flatter light. Easy to edit? Not always. Fun? Definitely.
Yep--even if you never shoot film, Ansel's "trilogy" (and his other books) are invaluable. His emphasis on pre-visualization and detailed explanations of how he created certain images not only gives you an appreciation and admiration for the often painstaking process involved in making those wonderful prints, but also how easy we have it if we choose the digital path. I still think you can get superior B&W images with film, but tools like Silver Effects Pro enable you to "dodge" and "burn" as well as apply many other filmesque techniques with the added advantages of ex post facto filter application (at any wavelength/intensity), very convincing film/grain emulation, and myriad other adjustments to help you realize your vision. The ability to undo/re-do and create/save custom presets is a bonus, as is the ability to highlight parts of the image that fall into the various Zones (and change as you adjust the exposure). With an EVF you no longer need to "see the world in B&W" as you can view the scene in monochrome (or any number of "creative filters"). It's just too easy! I never rely on a camera's built-in light meter. In most cases, I just want to avoid blown-out highlights, so I avoid the zebras, as I can always recover shadow detail (I always shoot RAW+JPG and process the RAW using DxO PhotoLab's DeepPRIME XD to remove noise if necessary), but there are times when exposure bracketing can be helpful. Oh, and thanks for including Ansel's explanation about reprinting the same negative--I've been looking for that.
I'm glad you made a distinction between digital cameras using saturation/contrast and film with filters. I've always known film has a richer quality to it. The way you articulated the difference was helpful.
I agree with you that you can’t get a great photo from a bad negative, except when you’re an Army photographer and you have a major on your rear telling to make him a publishable print. Somehow you do it. Multi contrast paper, burning and dodging and few other tricks get you a decent print.
As I left photography this was an analog world and I was producing color trasparencies. As I came back, more than a decade later, photography had gone digital and post-processing software was widely available. Seeing GIMP was so complicated I got hold of LightZone which, as the name suggests, is based on the Zone System formulated by Ansel Adams. This is obviouly an ideal cost free tool for black & white. I might mention, that if your source happens to be a color image, first apply any filters and then convert to B&W according to the formula Y = 0,11B + 0,30R + 0,59G. Do NOT simply „desaturate“! The formula delevers the photometrically correct input for your black and white processing.
A big pro to electronic viewfinders is that you can select a monochromatic profile and see the world in black and white and see it change with your exposure.
Hi Alex, have you done a video on John Sexton - probably the most successful of Ansel Adam's assistants - lovely sumptuous images rich in tonality and texture - "The Quiet Light" is a good starting point.
I teach basic photography at a local community college to adults continuing their education or personal; enrichment. I always ask them to name a famous artist and they can name several, I ask them to name a photographer and typically Ansel Adams is the only name they know.
Before I started watching TH-cam-Videos with the emphasis on non-gear-centric or purely technical (aperture, ISO, Focussing and all that good stuff) I couldn’t name a single photographer. Not even Ansel Adams. It's just since maybe 2-3 years I learn about them. I'm 54 years old. So never in my life famous photographers were something I cared for. Only when I started to put more time and energy into this hobby, this became part of what I looked at. Alex' channel had a huge impact on this. I guess this is the same for most people. Photography as an art form is probably mostly noticed by other photographers.
i don’t even know who ansel adams may be. however, i’m not a kind of person who focuses on ‘naming people’ even though i know several influential photographers
I achieve interesting black and white results using an infrared filter last year. Curiously it was closer to my pre-visualisation as I was going for something otherworldly on a piece of modern architecture. But it did occur to me at the time that these relatively inexpensive filters can help achieve the drama you get with snow. Only technical challenge is that they’re rated something nuts like 15 stops and everything comes out red to start with so using histograms etc is critical to get the exposure.
Love your channel. Im a hobbyist, but I enjoy growing as a photographer. I learn so much from your videos, but must importantly you and The Art of Photography channel showed me what photography as an art is. I think looking at the images you showcase throughout the vids was the most crucial part of me developing visually. I dont usually comment, but wanted to say: thanks for what you are doing here.
i think this is very important part: B&W is not simply colour photo with no saturation. it's much more than that, some go as far to say that the entire process is different for B&W, that's why not every shot works in monotone
A wonderful video. I had a teacher that told me that there are no stupid questions. So I'm going to be stupid and ask it. In the whole video, there is talk of tone, shadow, something like texture. I would enjoy hearing views about the subject. Is the subject tone, shadow, texture? is it a mountain range, a length of trees? How does the actual subject affect the image. Again, enjoy the site and thanks.
Wonderful video! I’ve mostly worked in color but have started dipping into black and white. You’ve given me much to think about for the next time I’m out shooting!!
I'm glad I discovered and stumbled upon this channel; Thank you! I learn quite a lot here. The delivery is strong and yet easy to learn. Thank you... Thank you... Thank you.
Great video, I love black and white images, but I believe rightly or wrongly I need to have a better understanding of my camera or buy an old SLR camera and use B&W film and learn.
Great video Alex, thank you. I picked up somewhere else that my Leica Q could be set up to have a monochrome screen and evf in the settings menu. The JPEG will be B&W but the raw file is still full colour when you open it in the develop module in Lightroom. This method also helped me with better understanding tonality and so the colour shot is equally better balanced by taking the shot in “B&W”. Saves you trying to visualise book 3 to some extent as you are doing it in camera! I would think these settings are available on other cameras brands as well?
100%, I was about to comment the same thing. The monochrome feature works equally well with the screens on my Nikon DSLR's and I often get better balanced colour shots by using it and shooting in black and white. Apparently the Nikon mirrorless EVF's work the same.
Thanks for this really inspiring video Alex. I’m new to your channel (just subscribed), and I’ll look for any videos you made that go in depth into dodging and burning. That seems to be a key element in the “negative” stage (maybe too the “print” stage). I mostly shoot digital and play with film. I need to work on my editing skills to keep my B&W images out of the *puddle*!!
It's in the black and white print that the true magic of photography took place. In the old day when we practicing black and white photos you needed to have access to a chambre noir to develop the negative and expose the image on the paper. It was like a mistical experience in practice. You have to play with formula, chemical, technical data, you have to take time to begin to see the image becoming to appear on paper. You have to analyze the density of the print. It was the symphony of the pictures. The negative was the partition and the print the orchestral result of ours vision. We lost ourself in the dark room to find the perfect print.
I always come back to few of my photos and sometimes I fell guilty not to say "it is and is this the way it will be for good". If I understood what you said I fell somehow validated in this pleasant act of reviewing my photos. I'm doing a lot of film bw photography and it's a pleasure challenge always. Thanks for this video.
If you forgot to bring a grey card so as to solve exposure in difficult circumstances, then you can measure the inside of your hand - it's remarkably close to that grey card. With digital, use the camera. While negative film can handle overexposure reasonably well, digital cameras and positive film cannot. Using a grey card might lead to the brightest areas in your image getting washed out. My camera has an easy (?) solution for that: "highlighted weighted metering". Here the camera scans what it sees (it's mirrorless so it has constant live view), builds the histogram by counting light values and number of photosites with a value. Then it takes the brightest photosite from this exercise and treats that EV as pure white. The sun in the frame will be ignored for simply being too bright. It's not fool proof - nothing can be that, because fools are so ingenious. The downside is that one tiny twinkle can drive exposure to make the image darker and it may consequently look between 1 and 3 EV underexposed. The good news is there is zero loss of details in the highlights. So you'll never lose detail in an overcast sky or a white bridal gown. With landscapes, using tripod, shoot a second image at 3 or more EV over exposed and you can HDR stack these into one (that potentially looks unnatural). Or over-expose up to 3 EV is you know, see, that highlights are specks within which you do not need detail (gradation).
Red filter - the go-to for contrasty skies of blue with white clouds turned black and white (B&W) - was the yellow filter. Over Ansel Adams's lifetime, B&W film evolved from monochromatic (it registered brightness only in one spectral color band hence mono=single and chromatic=color where spectral references the humanly visible spectrum), to "orthochromatic" ("orthos" =proper or correct) to, finally, "panchromatic" ("pan"=all). Our sensors are analog like film and colorblind but panchromatic in this B&W sense - calling a Leica "Monochrom" is a misnomer in that sense. This is to say that how people used to filter depends on the spectral sensitivity of your film. If your film is monochromatic and sensitive to the red zone of the spectrum only, then this would render lips white and you need to put black lipstick on them to make them stand out in B&W (which applies to early pre-WW2 B&W movies). There's no point in a red filter. Such film will give contrasty skies as blue will look black, being farthest away from the red spectral zone. As a panchromatic digital camera does not register color, you would need to have physical filters, as in the old days, in order to influence the depiction of brightness levels in the resulting image. A digital color camera uses the colorblind panchromatic sensor with a filter grid over it that filters each photosite down to one of three spectral color bands: red, green, or blue. From this, in your raw file, when you shoot 14 bits depth, your get monochrome data elements of 14 bits wide that represent either red, or green, or blue EV levels. This being 100% color noise and 100% luminance noise, is converted into RGB pixels by "raw processing" - mathematically precise and repeatable wild-assed guessing of missing colors. DxO Mark says that we get 27 bits color space from the best sensors (9 red, 9 green, 9 blue and the very precise 14 have been evaporated to be condensed into 27 bits resulting from the wild-assed guessing). I call that "sensor" attribution baloney. How a camera registers color is primarily or totally a function of the wavelength specification of the filter grid over the sensor, in (a) cut-off or crossing-over wavelengths and (b) how fast the cut-off or cross-over is (this compares to the X dB per octave filter fall off in loudspeaker cross-over filters). So the 27 bits RGB from 14 raw monochrome bits represent the best that developers of raw processing software can do. The 9+9+9 does seem like a loss, but - glass half empty or half full - 14 became 27. Yes, JPEG is 24 (8+8+8) and that makes 27 marginally better, but we have maximum influence over the conversion from 14 to 27 and that's the whole point. That's not where it ends though. If we talk about "resolution" then I would distinguish two things: detail and gradation. If you are - like Ansel Adams - very critical to gradation in your resulting images, then you can take your raw processed images from Lightroom Classic (LrC) into Photoshop (Ps) and convert them from the bits per channel LrC has into 16 bits per channel or even 32. The difference can seem magical. Raw processing must do two things: (a) wild-assed color guessing and (b) decide how to depict square pixels in the case of subject lines or edges that are not parallel to the sensor grid (preventing jagged lines/edges aka sharpening) and a variant of this in the case of gradients (preventing jagged banding). We have applications that can do upsampling (blow your image up beyond 100% by inventing context-proper new pixels - in the case of 2 times linear magnification, how do you turn one pixel into four) rather than mathematically simple and naive upscaling. Take Topaz's Gigapixel AI (GPAI) - Adobe has serious work to do to catch up there, in the domain of upsampling or enhancing "detail resolution". Well, in the domain of "gradation resolution", Ps does a fabulous job. But I might want to run my raw image from LrC through Topaz's DeNoise AI (DNA), Sharpen AI (SA) and GPAI before I take it into Ps. Because DNA and SA do a better job in that area of responsibility of raw processing. And because at a very large print size it becomes this critical.
Nicely done, Alex (the "white is the new black" slip notwithstanding, but your wife will never let you live that down, so we can leave you be). "Muddy, flat, gray puddle of tones," delivered with dripping disdain -- perfect. And, an apt description of many early efforts (my own decades ago emphatically included). I would only add, as complement, Adams's own well-known quip, that nothing is less successful than a sharp print of a fuzzy concept. He was referring not to focus sharpness and lack of blur, per se, but to the "technically perfect" print with its expertly-rendered tonal range, in which composition has been, to put it nicely, inadequately considered. I agree (not everyone does) that mastery of craft is essential to art but not sufficient. Without it, the artist's idea will be robbed of its full potential expression; without a unifying idea to direct the technique, the perfectly rendered elements are left to relative chaos.
During my family portraits I will often decide they are good candidates for black&white I will tell them I'm going to shoot in B&W. To think in B&W moods. I let ot affect there movement, their attitudes and it changes the whole shoot. They think of their favorite B&W magazine picture or they go to what they think of as film noir. It shows in the final edit. ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 🌴 📸
8:00 An other trick to get a good exposure is to get a reading from your hand and do your exposure +1 . I know this only works with my hand (European white) but I think with some experiments every body can just use their hands. (It's hard to leave you hand in the car :) ) A kind of sunny16 rule, but hey, if it it works
When one employs Adams’ Zone System one learns to “see” in back and white, literally, to be able to previsualize the image. However, that ability to “see” the image in black and white can be lost if ignored. Make no mistake, Adams’ also taught that no image is literal, it is always a creation, an interpretation of a scene that is a product both of exposure and darkroom. No Adam’s manipulated and massaged every print until it became the image he saw before he released the shutter. One would think (without really thinking) that this system cannot be replicated in the digital realm, but one must realize that the Zone System simply is a manipulation of densities and every piece of photo software (Photoshop, Affinity Photo, whatever) does exactly the same thing as Adams did in his darkroom. The software is literally a digital darkroom.
The most important thing is the negative . To get rich tones on your darkroom prints your film must have a CLEAR BASE , If it has a medium to dark grey base iit will be a lost effort , you will never get a rich tone darkroom print . In 135 film there are a very few black and white films with a clear base like the 25 to 100 ISO 120 films . In 135 I use Rollei R 80 200 400 S films , Rollei RPX 25 also have a clear base . Before I used grey based 135 films in my Contax IIIA , I became dull darkroom prints , more or less a lost effort in expensive darkroom paper . Thats why I use most of the time medium format 6x7 . With the 135 Rollei RPX 25 or Superpan 200 I can get also rich tone prints from my Contax IIIA .
Topic Idea 💡 Is at least part of why we revere the photography “Greats” Simply nostalgia? There are millions of landscape photos that are arguably just as good/better than Ansel Adams. But yet as he was sort of the first celebrity landscape photographer he is revered above all still. I feel this happens in almost every genera of photography. Great Video as always Alex Cheers 🍻
Because all of the "great" photos today are still based off of what he did, how he did it and the angles he did it at. When you're at the summit, no one can be higher than you. Go look at an actual AA print and you'll be blown away. Most photographers today don't even remotely touch the level of AA, and not to mention, he did everything in a darkroom. Not cheating with photoshop. "Hmmm..moons not big enough, let me just grab one off the internet and paste it in! hit multiply, done". Adams spent YEARS perfecting a SINGLE photograph. That's why we revere him. He's an artist.
Hi Adrian, I absolutely agree with almost everything you’ve said here and truly I’m not talking about only AA. But in general I feel the reverence is sometimes based on seeing photos that don’t reflect the world we live in today. It’s a photo we “can’t make” I’m only two years into my journey but I love studying “masters” but I’m always wondering if that nostalgia makes the photos something more. Truly they are all something different to each individual that views them. That’s all. Cheers 🍻
People with a strong aesthetic sense don't need a lot of intellectualization to produce fine images. Someone that needs a treatise to determine how to salt and pepper their supper should not become a chef. Unless you are operating mindlessly EVERY photograph will involve some degree of "per-visualization". That's why you bring your camera to your eye in the first place. Choosing the B&W mode on you camera can be helpful in seeing the scene in tones - great for beginners. Don't worry about the zone system - learn the histogram and the best method on your camera for creating the optimal raw exposure. (I use zebras set to indicate raw clipping) Become an expert on managing black point, white point, and the tone curve for B&Ws that "pop". IMO Adams is just one of very many superb B&W photographers.
Lovely. This an outstanding post. I have a question however. You always say two phrases after what I would consider to be an introduction to what you are going to talk about. It sounds like, and the captions suggest that it's "How's it, how's it"? Is that what you are saying, and what do you mean by that?
It's 'howzit howzit'. It’s a South African slang term for 'Hello/how is it/what's up?' - Alex used to live in South Africa, where he also went to photo school.
I'm almost exclusively do black and whites. Also, I almost only print black and white pictures which have some pure white and some pure black in it - and if they are many shades of grey between those two, I'm happy. The more of such shades, the happier I am. The funny thing is, that in nearly every motif there is actually some pure white and some pure black present - and the art is, to see them and to expose the negative correctly that you have both in your negative, totally burnt out parts for pure whites and totally unmolested silver for the blacks (yes, I do film, not digital). For this, you mainly need to know your film and how it reacts to over- and underexposure. I am not out for the perfect mid-tone grey exposure, I'm out for the best compromise of exposure to keep the blacks black and the whites white - what in the end probably leads to the same result. After all, with film, you expose it with just one aperture and shutter speed combination, and this one combination determines if you will have pure white and pure black to print. (Yes, I know that there are other "manipulations" available to influence this in the film developing, the enlarging, or in the scanning and printing processes, but those are nothing but workarounds to try to make the best out of a suboptimal exposed negative or a light situation which overtaxed the capacity of the film.)
Fun tip. Shoot in black and white on your Leica in camera for about a month. Not as good as shooting black and white film for six years - but it will really get your expectation of contrast to accommodate the b&w look.
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Ansel Adams was one of the reasons I took up photography, and I read his trio of Negative, Camera, Print books back in the early 80's... I need to reread them, it's been a while.
I've been editing some of my old color images of Yosemite into black and white over the past few weeks and did a search on youtube for Ansel Adams videos because I wanted to see how many photographers talked about photographing b/w in the style of Adams that actually mention gray scale and the zone system. Not very many. We can always count on you to be thorough!!
Alex, your black and white images are so much stronger. There’s a moodiness, a vibe about them that is emotionally provocative. Thanks for another thoughtful video!
Thank you
Adams used a spot meter. He would pre-visualize the desired result in his mind's eye and then measure the brightness range and expose a sheet of film according to the range (zones). He would then process the film and give increased development time for a low contrast scene and shorter development time for a high contrast (over exposed) scene. He would also use different grades of paper to increase or reduce contrast. It's difficult to replicate the zone system on a digital sensor because it behaves differently from film and is more like transparency film. Thanks for the video.
The same principal for digital applies, except you meter the highlights and place the highlights into zone 8-7.
@@Adrian-wd4rn The tonal range of 4x5 inch film is not the same as a digital capture, not yet. Black and white film has a huge latitude which is quite forgiving when overexposed. Adams exploited this to the max, the Dmax, ho ho.
@@canturgan same principal applies, digital also has high latitude, unless you're shooting a trash digital camera.
I think this is some of the most useful and profound videos on how to create rich B&W images. Because digital makes transformations to B&W so quickly it’s easy to overlook all the additional work you can do to further enhance monochrome images. When necessary giving each part of an image it’s own tonal treatment by applying masks of varying levels, curves and contrast as well as burning & dodging will go a long way to achieving that goal.
Hi Alex, I may not have commented on your channel before, but I love what you are doing here, your channel is refreshingly not about kit or kit reviews but more about photography itself, the thought process, the vision and the execution of creating a great photograph. This is such a refreshing approach that not many communicate, well done!
That’s awesome to hear, thank you for your comment. ☺️
Well said David, I heartedly agree with you!
I agree. His videos are inspiring and encouraging.
1:13 … thank you! I get so tired of creative people, especially “successful” creative people saying it’s the journey, not the destination that matters! Hell with that! I want the print! I want that destination! 😊
Just rewatched this. I've recently become very dedicated to shooting black and white. This is one of my favorite chats of yours.
Thank you
so true ... every time i go back to an old image, i process it differently. i love rich colour, but i adore b/w!
Same with me. And sometimes I'm thinking: What on earth did I think I was doing? 😂
Couldn't agree more! so many photographers get B&W wrong these days. It's meant to be 'Black & White' not 'Dark grey & lighter grey' 🙂
I never got very good at dodging and burning in the darkroom, but I have invested a lot of time in learning every possible method to accomplish it in Photoshop; not just for black and white, either.
Not only are your videos so informative and thought-provoking, they continually inspire me to grab my camera and get out and take photos. Thank you, for the serious time and effort you put into freely sharing your knowledge and experience with us.
Awesome to hear. Thank you
I remember seeing an Adams exhibition at a gallery in San Francisco in the early 1990's. As I sat in the middle of the room, I noticed that his photo "Clearing Winter Storm" was to my right. As I looked from right to left, I saw that directly opposite "Clearing.." was another totally different looking image but it quickly became obvious that the camera was in almost exactly the same place as "Clearing...". The two images brought to light totally different aspects of the same landscape. That is what "pre-visualization" is all about.
Ansel Adams showed me what good b/w photos could look like back in 1978. BUT it was the subject matter of the early photojournalists like HCB, Capa and the like that inspired me to shoot. Eventually, just after I turned 50, I left my engineering position to make it as a newspaper shooter. It lasted for 10 wonderful years before the print industry collapsed.
Also the use of filters is why I still shoot RAW and use Silver Efex filters to see the changes to an image.
Some great tips as always! I have found some big benefits by shooting in monochrome raw and revert to colour in post. This turns the viewfinder to monochrome and has aided my exposure, composition, focus accuracy and attention to shadows. I sometimes found the colour to overwhelming/ distracting through a viewfinder.
+1 this idea. I was at a photo conference at a botanical garden last year, and on the last day, I set my camera to monochrome as an exercise in stripping away distracting color and focusing on line, tones, shadow, light, texture, etc. It was fabulous fun and a great learning experience.
I’ve had these three books for about 35 years, but haven’t opened them in a long time. I just started perusing The Camera again a few days ago. Even though the term “camera” means something quite different from Adam’s time the explanations and illustrations regarding how light behaves, optics, planes of focus, apertures and the rest are all really well done and very useful still. If I were to teach beginning photography I would reference this book a lot. Time to review the other two volumes. 🙏👏👏👏
I love how passionate you are about this!
Fun fact: If you look at the three prints of Adams' El Cap photo, you'll notice the first shows a little more of the top of the cliff, while the other two are slightly more tightly cropped. This is because the negative was damaged in a fire at Adams' studio, forcing him to trim the damaged edge from the negative.
A few years back I saw a Ansel Adams exhibit in Tucson it was a small exhibit
But so good.it had his final prints but also a print out of camera plus the negative and the OOC print was flat but after the darkroom magic it was unbelievable.
They also had written instructions for his students to print showing what areas andhow long to dodge and burn,it was the best AA exhibit I've ever seen
Excellent! I love what you do Alex. I used to shoot black and white and enjoy all of the qualities that metering, time of day, tonality, filters and lens character bring to image capture. Choice of film stock, what speed rating to use for the conditions, where to focus and how to maintain details in key areas of the negative. Which developer and dilution. What paper to use and what differential exposure techniques. It takes a lot of artisanal and technical brainpower to land a print from a great negative. It was good seeing Ansel Adams talking about the human factor in making prints because that’s how it feels to make a photograph, it’s an art.
It would be helpful to show Ansel's notes for the prints he made to make the idea you present clear to everyone. This will give you a deeper understanding of the photographic process. The explanation of the grey scale concept needs to be clarified. The idea is to choose where you want the mid-tone grey zone to fall. Then, if necessary, use a filter to help guide your proposed image toward your concept. Also keep a record of how you exposed and processed your photo. It is important to create a record of the complete process used to create your completed image
Excellent material! There are lots of fairly good photography channels on TH-cam, but I don't know anyone else having as much passion for photography as you do.
Awesome, thank you
When I first got started in photography back on the 80s, I of course loved AA's work. As my taste evolved and changed over the years I don't really like the majority of his work anymore, although I still enjoy some. I find much of his work to be too heavy handed/exaggerated. His employment of the RED filter makes the skys so dark the photos look more like moonscapes to me rather than landscapes. I 10000% respect his contribution to the medium of photography, a giant on the art world and he was a wonderful person too.
A Wratten #90 filter is great for visualizing in monochrome when you come upon a scene and you want to get an idea of what it might look like in B&W.
That’s what Ansel Adams used.
I'm at a point in my photographic journey where I am only seeking out preconceived images. It provides an excellent sense of purpose and goal, whenever setting out to shoot.
I'll keep saying this. Your channel Is highly underrated
Thank you
Very cool video. I worked in a Pro lab of black and white as a kid. It was an awesome education that I never appreciated for the longest time. We printed b/w for fine art photographers as well as commercial headshots. The skill of the printers has been lost in the digital age where no one prints b/w anymore.
My Grandpa inspired me to take up photography at an early age and some years later as a teen I remember giving him a book of Ansel Adams photos. I am a beginning adult piano student so maybe the music will inspire me to create some proper B&W snaps that please me at the least. Ta very much.
Thanks for watching
I own two of those Ansel Adams books and they are a wealth of helpful information. Of course black and white isn't just about desaturation. It starts from the moment you go out with your camera and are looking for subjects with a decent amount of tonal variation. Thankfully with editing software like Capture One which I use, there is a black and white tool with sliders for various colours that does the job a colour filter would have done in the film days but with the advantage of being able to lighten or darken multiple colours (tones in black and white) instead of just the one with a filter.
Photographic B&W filter ( broadband pass ) do not work anything like the sliders in the digital software, much like those ridiculous ' film emulation ' presets. The effect of a filter is much more subtle as it also lightens some colours as well as darkening the complimentary colours. Usually a photographer can spot the manipulated digital photo from a mile away, due to the very harsh end results. If you do use these sliders then their use has to be highly judicious.
@@lensman5762 If someone shoots digital photography and wants to produce a b&w image then they will need to use tools like the colour sliders in order to edit specific tones and add contrast to the photo. Yes it’s very easy to go over the top which is why people need to be subtle with the editing. I don’t necessary find the contrast in b&w film photographs always pleasing. Also I never go near any film emulation tools/presets, especially film grain as they never look authentic. I just accept my photos are digital and do the best I can with the edit.
Thank you for your continued output of inspiring and thought-provoking videos, Alex. I'm consistently lifted up and encouraged to learn more as I continue to encounter the work of the great artists who've come before.
On a recent trip to the US, I visited a used book store and found both The Negative and The Print, first editions (though not 1st printing), to complement my copy of The Camera. They were ten dollars each. I sat on the floor among the bookshelves in silent, teary-eyed disbelief at my good fortune.
That is awesome, thank you
Another great video thankyou, Ive been a fan of Sebastiao Salgado forever, he has an amazing documentary about his journey but his photographs are amazing, not only that but he's an environmentalist. Mr Salgado has been an inspiration in my work, thankyou again
Thanks for watching
The man I saw in this video is no twit. Rather, he is a great, kind, and sharing man who remains humble. All whilst being human : )
A great book Ansel wrote was about his 20 or so best images. One of my faves is “moonrise, Hernandez New Mexico” (the moon is rising above a graveyard in the distance.) the story of that one really stuck with me. It was hurriedly captured on the way back from a lousy day of shooting with no good images. He saw it through the car windshield, stopped the car and rapidly setup and took the shot.
Ansel's analogy that a print is like a piece of music is appropriate as he was a concert pianist in his early life.
If you are a fan of Ansel's works, don't forget to check his assistants works too: John Sexton, Alan Ross, etc. They are also fine printers.
I really like John Sexton's Places of Power.
So it looks like creating my ideal B&W photo is not determining the correct zone to shot at but rather creating a final product that is a mix of highlights and shadows that will draw in the eye and create an exciting composition whose appeal is log lasting.
Love this, thanks. Was just having this problem with a black and white photo. It's a still life, and I'm lacking a good lighting set up at the moment. I didn't even know Ansel Adams had written books!
thinking in mono is very different than real life color, which I like, I have the habit, without a camera, to look at a scene and try to find the brighest part and then the darkest part, sqinting can help. Also, some sofware (silver fx) have 10 zones of b&w, you can click on say zone 5 and it will show on the image. keep up the good work Alex, and yes zone 0 is pure black😊
These mini-seminars on photographic technique are really valuable, and this is the format that you excel in. Brilliantly researched, and thoughtfully presented. Fantastic!!
That’s awesome, thank you
Thanks for another great video! Ansel Adam’s work is an inspiration to me along with Sebastian Salgado and Robert Frank.
Love this video. I cannot work in the dark room now but I still shoot in black and white with my manual cameras. Over the years, I am seventy-five now, my emotions have changed, I have changed and my. subject matter has changed. I have read all three of Adam's books and studied with one od his students. Yet, I found out how difficult the process could be as paper disappeared from the market, film disappeared or became way too expensive. The Zone System testing is done for every film, with each of the lenses that you used was exceedingly time consuming but worth it if you had the time. I do not know if Ansel Adams would have switched to a digital darkroom but he might have. You are correct in that you need to know what you want in the end product and again, that change is okay. Get there as close as you can and make the changes over time with the energy and resources you have. Thank you.
Thanks for watching
I draw now - with graphite and charcoals - but before that I was semi-pro shooting shows, festivals and the odd bit of press work - and no matter how much colour work I did, I always found time to try the images as b&w. I was definitely inspired by AA and HCB as a child and nowdays I always look at any image as a b&w before I even consider it as a colour image - and I never draw in colour - itks too complicated and it just feels wrong. I’ve also been known to say that ‘Colour is the last refuge of those who can’t handle b&w!’
So Eggleston just couldn’t handle shooting in B&W? 😅 You know it’s not a competition. One thing isn’t better than the other thing. Color describes. B&W is an abstraction. That’s all there is to it.
I feel the same way about drawing in color..
Wonderful episode and thanks Alex. I have these ideas in my head of what I'd like to create, but have yet to learn the digital tools and techniques to experiment and then present them
them
Honestly, I think the most fun way to shoot black and white is infrared. 720nm or 850nm specifically. With enough sunlight and a blue enough sky, you'll get those black or nearly black skies, but all of the foliage in your shots and most of the people in it and their clothes will be _bright_ white. Cloudy day? Still not an issue. It'll either be nearly indistinguishable from any other black and white photo and be pretty good for it, or you'll still have the same bright white tones from organic matter and clothing but with flatter light.
Easy to edit? Not always. Fun? Definitely.
Yep--even if you never shoot film, Ansel's "trilogy" (and his other books) are invaluable. His emphasis on pre-visualization and detailed explanations of how he created certain images not only gives you an appreciation and admiration for the often painstaking process involved in making those wonderful prints, but also how easy we have it if we choose the digital path. I still think you can get superior B&W images with film, but tools like Silver Effects Pro enable you to "dodge" and "burn" as well as apply many other filmesque techniques with the added advantages of ex post facto filter application (at any wavelength/intensity), very convincing film/grain emulation, and myriad other adjustments to help you realize your vision. The ability to undo/re-do and create/save custom presets is a bonus, as is the ability to highlight parts of the image that fall into the various Zones (and change as you adjust the exposure).
With an EVF you no longer need to "see the world in B&W" as you can view the scene in monochrome (or any number of "creative filters"). It's just too easy! I never rely on a camera's built-in light meter. In most cases, I just want to avoid blown-out highlights, so I avoid the zebras, as I can always recover shadow detail (I always shoot RAW+JPG and process the RAW using DxO PhotoLab's DeepPRIME XD to remove noise if necessary), but there are times when exposure bracketing can be helpful.
Oh, and thanks for including Ansel's explanation about reprinting the same negative--I've been looking for that.
I'm glad you made a distinction between digital cameras using saturation/contrast and film with filters. I've always known film has a richer quality to it. The way you articulated the difference was helpful.
I agree with you that you can’t get a great photo from a bad negative, except when you’re an Army photographer and you have a major on your rear telling to make him a publishable print. Somehow you do it. Multi contrast paper, burning and dodging and few other tricks get you a decent print.
Great lessons on photography. Thanks.
One humble suggestion- sound/volume levels of your videos are always low. Please consider to increase the levels
Alex, do a video on the surrealists. THAT is an interesting subject. The surrealists and pictoralists were the MASTERS of fine art photography.
As I left photography this was an analog world and I was producing color trasparencies. As I came back, more than a decade later, photography had gone digital and post-processing software was widely available. Seeing GIMP was so complicated I got hold of LightZone which, as the name suggests, is based on the Zone System formulated by Ansel Adams. This is obviouly an ideal cost free tool for black & white.
I might mention, that if your source happens to be a color image, first apply any filters and then convert to B&W according to the formula Y = 0,11B + 0,30R + 0,59G. Do NOT simply „desaturate“! The formula delevers the photometrically correct input for your black and white processing.
A big pro to electronic viewfinders is that you can select a monochromatic profile and see the world in black and white and see it change with your exposure.
I think its much beter to use a spot meter to controll your highlights and shadows and to aim to specific zone for specific part of the frame
Love Sebastios work too. I find it helps to look at charcoal/pencil sketches also to train my eye to see B&W. Thanks
Hi Alex, have you done a video on John Sexton - probably the most successful of Ansel Adam's assistants - lovely sumptuous images rich in tonality and texture - "The Quiet Light" is a good starting point.
Love your videos and your love of photography
good mono episode on the Great Ansel Adams. (zone system etc)
I teach basic photography at a local community college to adults continuing their education or personal; enrichment. I always ask them to name a famous artist and they can name several, I ask them to name a photographer and typically Ansel Adams is the only name they know.
Yeah, it's weird like that. Photographers just don't linger in the public conciousness at all (even if they manage to get there in the first place)
Before I started watching TH-cam-Videos with the emphasis on non-gear-centric or purely technical (aperture, ISO, Focussing and all that good stuff) I couldn’t name a single photographer. Not even Ansel Adams. It's just since maybe 2-3 years I learn about them. I'm 54 years old. So never in my life famous photographers were something I cared for. Only when I started to put more time and energy into this hobby, this became part of what I looked at. Alex' channel had a huge impact on this.
I guess this is the same for most people. Photography as an art form is probably mostly noticed by other photographers.
In the DPreview forums, the only photographers most people know are Peter Lik and Ansel Adams.
i don’t even know who ansel adams may be. however, i’m not a kind of person who focuses on ‘naming people’ even though i know several influential photographers
Photography was a thing long ago. Before the internet.
I achieve interesting black and white results using an infrared filter last year. Curiously it was closer to my pre-visualisation as I was going for something otherworldly on a piece of modern architecture. But it did occur to me at the time that these relatively inexpensive filters can help achieve the drama you get with snow. Only technical challenge is that they’re rated something nuts like 15 stops and everything comes out red to start with so using histograms etc is critical to get the exposure.
Love your channel. Im a hobbyist, but I enjoy growing as a photographer. I learn so much from your videos, but must importantly you and The Art of Photography channel showed me what photography as an art is. I think looking at the images you showcase throughout the vids was the most crucial part of me developing visually. I dont usually comment, but wanted to say: thanks for what you are doing here.
What awesome words, thank you for watching
i think this is very important part: B&W is not simply colour photo with no saturation. it's much more than that, some go as far to say that the entire process is different for B&W, that's why not every shot works in monotone
Hear, hear!!
Great video as always. I love black &white photography. I've been trying black &white recently myself and it is a challenge.
A wonderful video. I had a teacher that told me that there are no stupid questions. So I'm going to be stupid and ask it. In the whole video, there is talk of tone, shadow, something like texture. I would enjoy hearing views about the subject. Is the subject tone, shadow, texture? is it a mountain range, a length of trees? How does the actual subject affect the image. Again, enjoy the site and thanks.
Wonderful video! I’ve mostly worked in color but have started dipping into black and white. You’ve given me much to think about for the next time I’m out shooting!!
Thank you for watching
Absolutely a pleasure to watch. Thank you.
Thank you.
I'm glad I discovered and stumbled upon this channel; Thank you! I learn quite a lot here. The delivery is strong and yet easy to learn. Thank you... Thank you... Thank you.
Welcome aboard! Thank you so much
Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta 315 gsm, this is a standard 'go to paper' especially for B&W followed by Fine Art Baryta 325 gsm for deep deep blacks.
Been thinking about black and white lately. Thanks Alex 🤘🏽
Great video, I love black and white images, but I believe rightly or wrongly I need to have a better understanding of my camera or buy an old SLR camera and use B&W film and learn.
I love this podcast, you're an amazing Teacher with so much I depth knowledge ❤️
Thank you
Great video Alex, thank you. I picked up somewhere else that my Leica Q could be set up to have a monochrome screen and evf in the settings menu. The JPEG will be B&W but the raw file is still full colour when you open it in the develop module in Lightroom. This method also helped me with better understanding tonality and so the colour shot is equally better balanced by taking the shot in “B&W”. Saves you trying to visualise book 3 to some extent as you are doing it in camera! I would think these settings are available on other cameras brands as well?
100%, I was about to comment the same thing. The monochrome feature works equally well with the screens on my Nikon DSLR's and I often get better balanced colour shots by using it and shooting in black and white. Apparently the Nikon mirrorless EVF's work the same.
I am making it a habit to comment on videos like this which is only about the art of photography ❤️
Thank you
Thanks for this really inspiring video Alex.
I’m new to your channel (just subscribed), and I’ll look for any videos you made that go in depth into dodging and burning. That seems to be a key element in the “negative” stage (maybe too the “print” stage). I mostly shoot digital and play with film. I need to work on my editing skills to keep my B&W images out of the *puddle*!!
Thank you
Yip thank you another beauty. Cheers Alex
Thank you
What is the Wednesday class or activity you mentioned? Where to find it or how to join? Thanks.
Passionate inspiration
thanks for uploading - awesome content
It's in the black and white print that the true magic of photography took place. In the old day when we practicing black and white photos you needed to have access to a chambre noir to develop the negative and expose the image on the paper. It was like a mistical experience in practice. You have to play with formula, chemical, technical data, you have to take time to begin to see the image becoming to appear on paper. You have to analyze the density of the print. It was the symphony of the pictures. The negative was the partition and the print the orchestral result of ours vision. We lost ourself in the dark room to find the perfect print.
Great video 👍wonderful tips, thx for sharing
You are so welcome!
I always come back to few of my photos and sometimes I fell guilty not to say "it is and is this the way it will be for good". If I understood what you said I fell somehow validated in this pleasant act of reviewing my photos.
I'm doing a lot of film bw photography and it's a pleasure challenge always. Thanks for this video.
Your welcome
If you forgot to bring a grey card so as to solve exposure in difficult circumstances, then you can measure the inside of your hand - it's remarkably close to that grey card. With digital, use the camera.
While negative film can handle overexposure reasonably well, digital cameras and positive film cannot. Using a grey card might lead to the brightest areas in your image getting washed out. My camera has an easy (?) solution for that: "highlighted weighted metering". Here the camera scans what it sees (it's mirrorless so it has constant live view), builds the histogram by counting light values and number of photosites with a value. Then it takes the brightest photosite from this exercise and treats that EV as pure white. The sun in the frame will be ignored for simply being too bright. It's not fool proof - nothing can be that, because fools are so ingenious.
The downside is that one tiny twinkle can drive exposure to make the image darker and it may consequently look between 1 and 3 EV underexposed. The good news is there is zero loss of details in the highlights.
So you'll never lose detail in an overcast sky or a white bridal gown. With landscapes, using tripod, shoot a second image at 3 or more EV over exposed and you can HDR stack these into one (that potentially looks unnatural). Or over-expose up to 3 EV is you know, see, that highlights are specks within which you do not need detail (gradation).
Some very good points Alex, Never knew about the Red Filter. Might be my next project. I have tried the dodge and burn but it's not very accurate.
Red filter - the go-to for contrasty skies of blue with white clouds turned black and white (B&W) - was the yellow filter. Over Ansel Adams's lifetime, B&W film evolved from monochromatic (it registered brightness only in one spectral color band hence mono=single and chromatic=color where spectral references the humanly visible spectrum), to "orthochromatic" ("orthos" =proper or correct) to, finally, "panchromatic" ("pan"=all). Our sensors are analog like film and colorblind but panchromatic in this B&W sense - calling a Leica "Monochrom" is a misnomer in that sense.
This is to say that how people used to filter depends on the spectral sensitivity of your film. If your film is monochromatic and sensitive to the red zone of the spectrum only, then this would render lips white and you need to put black lipstick on them to make them stand out in B&W (which applies to early pre-WW2 B&W movies). There's no point in a red filter. Such film will give contrasty skies as blue will look black, being farthest away from the red spectral zone.
As a panchromatic digital camera does not register color, you would need to have physical filters, as in the old days, in order to influence the depiction of brightness levels in the resulting image.
A digital color camera uses the colorblind panchromatic sensor with a filter grid over it that filters each photosite down to one of three spectral color bands: red, green, or blue. From this, in your raw file, when you shoot 14 bits depth, your get monochrome data elements of 14 bits wide that represent either red, or green, or blue EV levels.
This being 100% color noise and 100% luminance noise, is converted into RGB pixels by "raw processing" - mathematically precise and repeatable wild-assed guessing of missing colors. DxO Mark says that we get 27 bits color space from the best sensors (9 red, 9 green, 9 blue and the very precise 14 have been evaporated to be condensed into 27 bits resulting from the wild-assed guessing). I call that "sensor" attribution baloney. How a camera registers color is primarily or totally a function of the wavelength specification of the filter grid over the sensor, in (a) cut-off or crossing-over wavelengths and (b) how fast the cut-off or cross-over is (this compares to the X dB per octave filter fall off in loudspeaker cross-over filters).
So the 27 bits RGB from 14 raw monochrome bits represent the best that developers of raw processing software can do.
The 9+9+9 does seem like a loss, but - glass half empty or half full - 14 became 27. Yes, JPEG is 24 (8+8+8) and that makes 27 marginally better, but we have maximum influence over the conversion from 14 to 27 and that's the whole point. That's not where it ends though.
If we talk about "resolution" then I would distinguish two things: detail and gradation.
If you are - like Ansel Adams - very critical to gradation in your resulting images, then you can take your raw processed images from Lightroom Classic (LrC) into Photoshop (Ps) and convert them from the bits per channel LrC has into 16 bits per channel or even 32. The difference can seem magical.
Raw processing must do two things: (a) wild-assed color guessing and (b) decide how to depict square pixels in the case of subject lines or edges that are not parallel to the sensor grid (preventing jagged lines/edges aka sharpening) and a variant of this in the case of gradients (preventing jagged banding).
We have applications that can do upsampling (blow your image up beyond 100% by inventing context-proper new pixels - in the case of 2 times linear magnification, how do you turn one pixel into four) rather than mathematically simple and naive upscaling. Take Topaz's Gigapixel AI (GPAI) - Adobe has serious work to do to catch up there, in the domain of upsampling or enhancing "detail resolution".
Well, in the domain of "gradation resolution", Ps does a fabulous job. But I might want to run my raw image from LrC through Topaz's DeNoise AI (DNA), Sharpen AI (SA) and GPAI before I take it into Ps. Because DNA and SA do a better job in that area of responsibility of raw processing.
And because at a very large print size it becomes this critical.
Thank you. All the best. 👍📷😎
Nicely done, Alex (the "white is the new black" slip notwithstanding, but your wife will never let you live that down, so we can leave you be). "Muddy, flat, gray puddle of tones," delivered with dripping disdain -- perfect. And, an apt description of many early efforts (my own decades ago emphatically included). I would only add, as complement, Adams's own well-known quip, that nothing is less successful than a sharp print of a fuzzy concept. He was referring not to focus sharpness and lack of blur, per se, but to the "technically perfect" print with its expertly-rendered tonal range, in which composition has been, to put it nicely, inadequately considered. I agree (not everyone does) that mastery of craft is essential to art but not sufficient. Without it, the artist's idea will be robbed of its full potential expression; without a unifying idea to direct the technique, the perfectly rendered elements are left to relative chaos.
Such an interesting and valuable video- thank you
Glad you enjoyed it!
He worked in large format and was a master of the dark room
During my family portraits I will often decide they are good candidates for black&white
I will tell them I'm going to shoot in B&W. To think in B&W moods. I let ot affect there movement, their attitudes and it changes the whole shoot.
They think of their favorite B&W magazine picture or they go to what they think of as film noir. It shows in the final edit.
⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 🌴 📸
8:00 An other trick to get a good exposure is to get a reading from your hand and do your exposure +1 . I know this only works with my hand (European white) but I think with some experiments every body can just use their hands. (It's hard to leave you hand in the car :) )
A kind of sunny16 rule, but hey, if it it works
Wonderful encouragement!
A twit perhaps (like the rest of us) but an entertaining and informative one. 😁😁
In regards to exposure: You can also set your camera to bracket and take 5 exposures quickly.
When one employs Adams’ Zone System one learns to “see” in back and white, literally, to be able to previsualize the image. However, that ability to “see” the image in black and white can be lost if ignored. Make no mistake, Adams’ also taught that no image is literal, it is always a creation, an interpretation of a scene that is a product both of exposure and darkroom. No Adam’s manipulated and massaged every print until it became the image he saw before he released the shutter. One would think (without really thinking) that this system cannot be replicated in the digital realm, but one must realize that the Zone System simply is a manipulation of densities and every piece of photo software (Photoshop, Affinity Photo, whatever) does exactly the same thing as Adams did in his darkroom. The software is literally a digital darkroom.
The most important thing is the negative . To get rich tones on your darkroom prints your film must have a CLEAR BASE , If it has a medium to dark grey base iit will be a lost effort , you will never get a rich tone darkroom print . In 135 film there are a very few black and white films with a clear base like the 25 to 100 ISO 120 films . In 135 I use Rollei R 80 200 400 S films , Rollei RPX 25 also have a clear base . Before I used grey based 135 films in my Contax IIIA , I became dull darkroom prints , more or less a lost effort in expensive darkroom paper . Thats why I use most of the time medium format 6x7 . With the 135 Rollei RPX 25 or Superpan 200 I can get also rich tone prints from my Contax IIIA .
Topic Idea 💡 Is at least part of why we revere the photography “Greats” Simply nostalgia? There are millions of landscape photos that are arguably just as good/better than Ansel Adams. But yet as he was sort of the first celebrity landscape photographer he is revered above all still. I feel this happens in almost every genera of photography. Great Video as always Alex Cheers 🍻
Because all of the "great" photos today are still based off of what he did, how he did it and the angles he did it at.
When you're at the summit, no one can be higher than you. Go look at an actual AA print and you'll be blown away. Most photographers today don't even remotely touch the level of AA, and not to mention, he did everything in a darkroom. Not cheating with photoshop. "Hmmm..moons not big enough, let me just grab one off the internet and paste it in! hit multiply, done".
Adams spent YEARS perfecting a SINGLE photograph. That's why we revere him. He's an artist.
Hi Adrian, I absolutely agree with almost everything you’ve said here and truly I’m not talking about only AA. But in general I feel the reverence is sometimes based on seeing photos that don’t reflect the world we live in today. It’s a photo we “can’t make” I’m only two years into my journey but I love studying “masters” but I’m always wondering if that nostalgia makes the photos something more. Truly they are all something different to each individual that views them. That’s all. Cheers 🍻
People with a strong aesthetic sense don't need a lot of intellectualization to produce fine images.
Someone that needs a treatise to determine how to salt and pepper their supper should not become a chef.
Unless you are operating mindlessly EVERY photograph will involve some degree of "per-visualization". That's why you bring your camera to your eye in the first place.
Choosing the B&W mode on you camera can be helpful in seeing the scene in tones - great for beginners.
Don't worry about the zone system - learn the histogram and the best method on your camera for creating the optimal raw exposure.
(I use zebras set to indicate raw clipping)
Become an expert on managing black point, white point, and the tone curve for B&Ws that "pop".
IMO Adams is just one of very many superb B&W photographers.
Lovely. This an outstanding post. I have a question however. You always say two phrases after what I would consider to be an introduction to what you are going to talk about. It sounds like, and the captions suggest that it's "How's it, how's it"? Is that what you are saying, and what do you mean by that?
It's 'howzit howzit'. It’s a South African slang term for 'Hello/how is it/what's up?' - Alex used to live in South Africa, where he also went to photo school.
@@Sven-R So howzit you know this?
Hi, Alex.
Is it possible to use the zone system from Ansel Adams in digital photography?
Antoine.
Yes- you will need to expose for highlights not shadows.
excellent tutorial
Glad you liked it
I'm almost exclusively do black and whites. Also, I almost only print black and white pictures which have some pure white and some pure black in it - and if they are many shades of grey between those two, I'm happy. The more of such shades, the happier I am.
The funny thing is, that in nearly every motif there is actually some pure white and some pure black present - and the art is, to see them and to expose the negative correctly that you have both in your negative, totally burnt out parts for pure whites and totally unmolested silver for the blacks (yes, I do film, not digital). For this, you mainly need to know your film and how it reacts to over- and underexposure.
I am not out for the perfect mid-tone grey exposure, I'm out for the best compromise of exposure to keep the blacks black and the whites white - what in the end probably leads to the same result. After all, with film, you expose it with just one aperture and shutter speed combination, and this one combination determines if you will have pure white and pure black to print. (Yes, I know that there are other "manipulations" available to influence this in the film developing, the enlarging, or in the scanning and printing processes, but those are nothing but workarounds to try to make the best out of a suboptimal exposed negative or a light situation which overtaxed the capacity of the film.)
Also why test strips are so important when printing. Need that dmax.
Fun tip. Shoot in black and white on your Leica in camera for about a month. Not as good as shooting black and white film for six years - but it will really get your expectation of contrast to accommodate the b&w look.