Recommended Exposures by Ansel Adams

[Petraio Prime]

What he did was easy. What I do is much harder.

But even if this were true (which it isn't) what difference does it make?
No one... random member of the public or veteran photographer is going to praise you on the difficulty of your image. Photography is a visual art often involving purely aesthetics, this is what matters when your images are viewed. Unless of course they fit a purpose, which yours do, to capture a rugby game, meaning to try and match it against an image which is more concerned with other things is futile.

I don't think you are quite appreciating landscape photography in the same way others do. I would consider it to be my main focus in my photography hobby, therefore when I see (maybe what you don't see) something about a landscape shot I really like, it connects with me.
If this doesn't happen to you, then fine. But you can't go ridiculing someone else's experience, you just have to deal with it.
You prefer Culture Club to Eric Clapton?, fine... I for one don't and am more likely to leave the room if someone starts blasting out 'Do you really want to hurt me'.

What difference does it make? A lot! There is actually some compositional merit in the one shot....

http://www.photographyboard.net/rugby-game-1087.html

Study it carefully. Note the lower left to upper right diagonal 'movement'. (Note the arms and the ball in lower left, and arms in the faces of the gentlemen in the upper right.)

All of the raving about landscapes amuses me.

No, I don't appreciate 'landscape photography'. It's banal and appeals to bourgeois tastes. It is a remnant of Romanticism, which I repudiate. You probably have no idea what I'm talking about. Oh well...

http://www.redbeansoup.net/nortonsimon/roman2.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landscape_art

You misread the quote. Someone in Culture Club said if he went to someone's house and saw an Eric Clapton record he would leave. When people start blathering on about landscape work or Ansel Adams to me, I leave...

I much prefer Salgado...

[TPF Sponsor]

[Arch]

What difference does it make? A lot! There is actually some compositional merit in the one shot....

http://www.photographyboard.net/rugby-game-1087.html

Study it carefully. Note the lower left to upper right diagonal 'movement'.

You've missed the point here, it really doesn't make any difference, we are talking about two different things.
What I was saying is... to the viewer it doesn't make any difference what the technical settings where when capturing an image. Photography is (or should be) much more harsh than that.... it is visual and therefore people make up their minds if they like (or connect with) the shot within a few seconds.
How it is captured is largely irrelevant.

No, I don't appreciate 'landscape photography'. It's banal and appeals to bourgeois tastes. It is a remnant of Romanticism, which I repudiate. You probably have no idea what I'm talking about. Oh well...

I know exactly what you are talking about, but in my opinion and the opinion of millions of others you are wrong. Landscape, certainly today, is not all about Romanticism, it is way beyond that.
Again this goes back to my point of what you see in photographs... what you look for and your own associations made to the elements of the scene.
For example, I look for light placement, colours + textures (in a purely aesthetic sense), and most importantly awe inspiring views of the natural earth. Sure, landscapes can convey the sense of nostalgia and/or fantasy which could be considered Romanticism, but to dismiss this style of photography as just that is really missing the point.

You misread the quote. Someone in Culture Club said if he went to someone's house and saw an Eric Clapton record he would leave. When people start blathering on about landscape work or Ansel Adams to me, I leave...

I dont know whats worse... the way I read it, or the fact that someone from Culture Club is knocking Eric Clapton

[Petraio Prime]

What difference does it make? A lot! There is actually some compositional merit in the one shot....

http://www.photographyboard.net/rugby-game-1087.html

Study it carefully. Note the lower left to upper right diagonal 'movement'.

You've missed the point here, it really doesn't make any difference, we are talking about two different things.
What I was saying is... to the viewer it doesn't make any difference what the technical settings where when capturing an image. Photography is (or should be) much more harsh than that.... it is visual and therefore people make up their minds if they like (or connect with) the shot within a few seconds.
How it is captured is largely irrelevant.

No, I don't appreciate 'landscape photography'. It's banal and appeals to bourgeois tastes. It is a remnant of Romanticism, which I repudiate. You probably have no idea what I'm talking about. Oh well...

I know exactly what you are talking about, but in my opinion and the opinion of millions of others you are wrong. Landscape, certainly today, is not all about Romanticism, it is way beyond that.
Again this goes back to my point of what you see in photographs... what you look for and your own associations made to the elements of the scene.
For example, I look for light placement, colours + textures (in a purely aesthetic sense), and most importantly awe inspiring views of the natural earth. Sure, landscapes can convey the sense of nostalgia and/or fantasy which could be considered Romanticism, but to dismiss this style of photography as just that is really missing the point.

You misread the quote. Someone in Culture Club said if he went to someone's house and saw an Eric Clapton record he would leave. When people start blathering on about landscape work or Ansel Adams to me, I leave...

I dont know whats worse... the way I read it, or the fact that someone from Culture Club is knocking Eric Clapton

Millions can be wrong...it happens all the time...

Well some people take themselves way too seriously. I think that's the point the Culture Club guy was making. And I have never owned any Eric Clapton albums (I did own a couple of Cream albums though).

And Meryl Streep can't act....

[Petraio Prime]

Well some people take themselves way too seriously.

Clearly

Oh, the critic can't be the one taking himself too seriously. It's not allowed!



I'm the critic here...

LOL

[Petraio Prime]

What difference does it make? A lot! There is actually some compositional merit in the one shot....

http://www.photographyboard.net/rugby-game-1087.html

Study it carefully. Note the lower left to upper right diagonal 'movement'.

You've missed the point here, it really doesn't make any difference, we are talking about two different things.
What I was saying is... to the viewer it doesn't make any difference what the technical settings where when capturing an image. Photography is (or should be) much more harsh than that.... it is visual and therefore people make up their minds if they like (or connect with) the shot within a few seconds.
How it is captured is largely irrelevant.

No, I don't appreciate 'landscape photography'. It's banal and appeals to bourgeois tastes. It is a remnant of Romanticism, which I repudiate. You probably have no idea what I'm talking about. Oh well...

I know exactly what you are talking about, but in my opinion and the opinion of millions of others you are wrong. Landscape, certainly today, is not all about Romanticism, it is way beyond that.
Again this goes back to my point of what you see in photographs... what you look for and your own associations made to the elements of the scene.
For example, I look for light placement, colours + textures (in a purely aesthetic sense), and most importantly awe inspiring views of the natural earth. Sure, landscapes can convey the sense of nostalgia and/or fantasy which could be considered Romanticism, but to dismiss this style of photography as just that is really missing the point.

You misread the quote. Someone in Culture Club said if he went to someone's house and saw an Eric Clapton record he would leave. When people start blathering on about landscape work or Ansel Adams to me, I leave...

I dont know whats worse... the way I read it, or the fact that someone from Culture Club is knocking Eric Clapton

You may find this interesting (not saying I agree or disagree, just showing some other points of view):

Ansel Adams: But is it art?

"Throughout the affluent world, and above all in the United States, Adams's wilderness studies are the staple of the gift store rather than the cutting-edge art gallery, and for every person who has ever seen an Adams print at close range there will be umpteen who know his work only from coffee-table books, glossy calendars, postcards and other studiedly tasteful bric-a-brac.

More than any other photographer, Adams has become established as the one you can take home to show the folks, with perfect confidence that he will ruffle no feathers, spoil no one's supper, so that the mass reproduction of images he made – mostly before 1949 – has grown into the kind of booming industry usually felt to be incompatible with photographic talents of the first rank."


"The escalating value of a Moonrise print is also a handy index of the sudden boom in the photographic collectors' market from the late 1970s onwards. In the late 1940s, Adams would sell a 16-by-20 print for just $50 (£32); in December 1979, an auction at Sotheby's in New York set three sales records when it brought in a successful bid of $22,000 (£14,000) for one of the same prints – the most ever paid up to that point for a work by a living photographer, the most ever paid for a 20th-century photograph, and the most for a work on paper. Since then, the Moonrise edition has gone on to make a vast sum in the resale market – a modest estimate being more than $25m (£16m).


All of which might point to little more than herd instinct and chronic poor taste among rich collectors, and a fortune made on the back of unfashionable inoffensiveness. There is something in this: considered cynically, Adams's photographs of the American West are spiritual cousins to those Impressionist studies of rural France so beloved of Japanese financiers. You don't need a higher degree in fine art to find them easy on the eye."

"The f/64 group was an avant-garde and, like all avant-gardes, its members were destined to be rejected by their juniors. Serious complaints about Adams's work became audible after the Second World War, and grew louder with the 1950s and 1960s, when the likes of Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand and William Klein came to the forefront of critical attention. Their work was variously rough-edged, jaundiced, improvised, harsh, neurotic, obsessive and unsettling: the polar opposite of everything Adams had accomplished, and, to the post-war sensibility, an exhilarating novelty. The task of photography, critics now tended to say, was more to shock and dismay than to celebrate and sooth, and if the ideal of "beauty" was to be evoked at all, it was more a question of discovering a fascination in the discarded or grotesque than in traditional canons of wholeness, harmony and radiance. It's a fair cop, as far as it goes. Klein, Frank and company are still very much critically OK, and will no doubt remain so as long as there is no such thing as a Diane Arbus wall calendar or desk diary, with freak-of-the-month displays. But there is, too, such a thing as the philistinism of the elite: a refusal to see the virtue of something popular simply because it is popular, or to take pleasure in a conventionally beautiful image simply because, like an Adams photograph, its beauty is conventional, "unchallenging", merely pretty.

At the very least, Adams deserves the tribute of open-mindedness and informed criticism; and one anecdote that should always be a small part of the whole story is that which tells how the critic Beaumont Newhall, idly flicking through a magazine, unexpectedly came across an Ansel Adams picture which made him literally fall back on the couch in surprise, murmuring that Adams must surely be the greatest photographer ever."

[DennyCrane]

tl;dr

[pbelarge]

Petraio
From what I read about the author of your "proof", he sells to the same crowd as Ansel did, the big difference is Ansel sold/still sells alot more than his measely work does - sounds like a person who got on the internet stage and ranted - just like you do.


I think this thread should be retitled:

Petraio Prime's Forlornness

[benlonghair]

Did you really just link something from Free Republic?! That's one of the most awesome things I've seen here. Many (especially me as a TotalFarker) think Freepers are a whole different (and probably un-evolved) species.

To all the other posters here:



To our newest troll:

Your stuff isn't even that good. The rugby stuff you posted are snapshots at best. Go look at some real sports photographers to see what happens when you actually isolate your subject from the background.

JFC, if I wasn't an accomplished troll, I wouldn't even be posting in this thread.

[DennyCrane]

tl;dr

Translation for those of us who aren't smart enough to know what that means??? Please???

Link

[Gaerek]

Why? OK, their work IS more important more involving, than Adams' is

Really? Prove it. Explain to me how this is. You made the claim, the burden of proof is on you. Or are you going to do what you've done this entire thread and simply cop out by making a claim with no substance?

Your arrogance is showing! Just because you say something is fact doesn't make it so. A claim without substance is still just an opinion. Keep trying.

At the very least, Adams deserves the tribute of open-mindedness and informed criticism;

I agree! Now, the informed part is the part you're missing. You are still having trouble backing up ANY claim you've made beyond something being your opinion.

Adam's work hold sentimental value to me, so I will admit my bias. However, if I were to look at his work objectively, I could honestly tell you I've seen work better than his. However, he still is the most recognized photographer ever, his work still sells, and his methods are still taught (quite a lot, even in photography school!). Let's not forget that those photographers you mentioned sold to the same circles as Adams, so your bourgeoisie argument holds as much water as a sieve. But becuase Petraio Prime says that Adams is a hack, and his zone system (which you're right, he didn't create, but he worked on, helped develop, and advocated it) is flawed, that I should automatically believe you?

Again, get over yourself. I'll take 70+ years of popular opinion on photography over the innane rantings of an anonymous Internet user any day of the year.

[Petraio Prime]

Why? OK, their work IS more important more involving, than Adams' is

Really? Prove it. Explain to me how this is. You made the claim, the burden of proof is on you. Or are you going to do what you've done this entire thread and simply cop out by making a claim with no substance?

Your arrogance is showing! Just because you say something is fact doesn't make it so. A claim without substance is still just an opinion. Keep trying.

At the very least, Adams deserves the tribute of open-mindedness and informed criticism;

I agree! Now, the informed part is the part you're missing. You are still having trouble backing up ANY claim you've made beyond something being your opinion.

Adam's work hold sentimental value to me, so I will admit my bias. However, if I were to look at his work objectively, I could honestly tell you I've seen work better than his. However, he still is the most recognized photographer ever, his work still sells, and his methods are still taught (quite a lot, even in photography school!). Let's not forget that those photographers you mentioned sold to the same circles as Adams, so your bourgeoisie argument holds as much water as a sieve. But becuase Petraio Prime says that Adams is a hack, and his zone system (which you're right, he didn't create, but he worked on, helped develop, and advocated it) is flawed, that I should automatically believe you?

Again, get over yourself. I'll take 70+ years of popular opinion on photography over the inane rantings of an anonymous Internet user any day of the year.

Well you must admit that the British reviewer does make many of the same points I do.

Proof? This can never be anything but a matter of taste and opinion, but mine is at least an informed opinion.

Even though I am on the internet, I do have 46 years of experience in 35mm B&W photography, and have tried many, many films, papers, developers, etc. I am no novice. I can make a pretty darn good 35mm B&W print.

Why is it so difficult to accept that anyone can be a critic of Adams, his disciples, his aesthetics, and his 'system'? Do you think for an instant that Salgado owes anything to the zone system? Of course not. He has a lab guy do most of his work (to the best of my knowledge). He's out there taking photographs...of things that matter (not 'pretty scenes'). I am sure he doesn't even think about exactly what shade of grey mud-covered skin will be.






Do you get it now?

[benlonghair]

Also, troll, why are you posting copyrighted images you don't have the rights to?

[Petraio Prime]

Also, troll, why are you posting copyrighted images you don't have the rights to?

They are merely links to published work. How else am I supposed to show you his work?

And why not address the arguments, instead of calling me 'troll'?

Do you or does anyone else notice the burning and dodging on Salgado's prints?

[benlonghair]

Also, troll, why are you posting copyrighted images you don't have the rights to?

They are merely links to published work. How else am I supposed to show you his work?

And why not address the arguments, instead of calling me 'troll'?

Do you or does anyone else notice the burning and dodging on Salgado's prints?

Because I troll trolls. And your arguments are too dumb to address directly.

You link copyrighted work, you post your own. That's how it works here. You're doing it exactly backwards. Although keep doing it, maybe it'll get you banned.

[Petraio Prime]

Also, troll, why are you posting copyrighted images you don't have the rights to?

They are merely links to published work. How else am I supposed to show you his work?

And why not address the arguments, instead of calling me 'troll'?

Do you or does anyone else notice the burning and dodging on Salgado's prints?

Because I troll trolls. And your arguments are too dumb to address directly.

You link copyrighted work, you post your own. That's how it works here. You're doing it exactly backwards. Although keep doing it, maybe it'll get you banned.

You have no idea what you are talking about. I'm not making 'copies' by linking to images that are already visible on the internet. No copyright is being violated.

Note how nice I am being to you...you might try it some time.