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03/14/2005 12:24:34 AM · #1 |
While I certainly didn't count on this to land me in the top ten...or top 50 for that matter.....I wasn't expecting 239th place.
Since I only got two comments, both positive overall......would anyone mind letting me know why this wasn't your cup of tea? I thought I approached the Zone System at least fairly well.....although now it seems I must have completely misunderstood it.
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03/14/2005 12:30:11 AM · #2 |
I didn't vote on every single picture in this challenge but I think what this picture is lacking is the sharpness that that is the Ansel Adams trademark. It also looks like a night shot using flash and that doesn't really represent AA style, but I may be wrong. Don't get me wrong, I like the picture, I just don't think it represents AA all that well.
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03/14/2005 12:32:20 AM · #3 |
I left a comment for you. Sorry I did not comment with my vote but .....
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03/14/2005 12:34:19 AM · #4 |
too me, it was the blur factor, and the fact that it looks like an inverted shot. Don't really care for inverts. Sorry.
Stephanie
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03/14/2005 12:35:31 AM · #5 |
It has a world of potential but it's not sharp and it lacks the tonal range we'd expect. On composition alone it's very anselly. But the craft of it is poor, as noted. I assume that's why. Gave it a 5 myself.
Robt.
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03/14/2005 12:37:00 AM · #6 |
Thanks for your feedback...I was going more for detail of texture over detail of terrain....it was actually taken right at sundown (that is all sunlight...no flash), and the tree was much brighter than the trees in the background, so I only enhanced the contrast between them. I think you're right, though...the lack of sharpness is probably what did me in.
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03/14/2005 01:06:07 AM · #7 |
For comparison, here's the unedited version. All I did was save for web/shrink it down.
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03/14/2005 01:40:18 AM · #8 |
Okay, here's my take on it with a more fully-expressed tonal range and some sharpening. It's not optimum, but that's as much time as I want to put into it...
And, of course, some may think it's no improvement at all...
Robt.
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03/14/2005 01:42:49 AM · #9 |
Originally posted by bear_music:
Okay, here's my take on it with a more fully-expressed tonal range and some sharpening. It's not optimum, but that's as much time as I want to put into it...
And, of course, some may think it's no improvement at all...
Robt. |
I like this version a lot.
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03/14/2005 01:47:13 AM · #10 |
The sharpness does make a huge difference.
On the tonal range.....I thought it was simply a matter of having the different tonal levels appear to some extent in the shot (which I thought I did for the most part), as opposed to having them more evenly represented throughout. Can you clarify?
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03/14/2005 01:59:14 AM · #11 |
Originally posted by sfboatright:
The sharpness does make a huge difference.
On the tonal range.....I thought it was simply a matter of having the different tonal levels appear to some extent in the shot (which I thought I did for the most part), as opposed to having them more evenly represented throughout. Can you clarify? |
An Ansel Adams image is PRIMARILY characterized (in terms of tonalities) by the richness of the detail in his deep shadows and the preservation of detail in his significant bright areas. His absolute blacks and absolute whites will rarely dominate an image, although there are some which appear, on the web, to have vast masses of black. In actuality, in the print, the black is what we call a "textured black", there's a sense of something there.
Your image, as originally posted, falls more into the range of "high contrast", white whites and black blacks and relatively little in between. By expressing a hint of the "forest floor" detail and by gaining more palpable texturing of the bright tree, we give the image more life and it seems more real to us. This was his genius; even though the images were EMPHATICALLY exaggerated in many cases (they looked nothing like what you or I would see in a quick glance) the exaggeration preserved enough sense of living detail to ocnvince us it was more real than the scene itself.
Nothing can be more illuminating than to take a book of Ansel's Yosemite images into Yosemite itself, and stand in the places where he made those images, at about the same time of day, and realize just how intense his "seeing" was. He wasn't primarily about dramatic light, contrary to popular conception; not all that many of his images actually have extreme, blasting sunlight and huge shadows. Look closely at "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico"; it's as dramatic as hell, but a close look will show there's actually NO definition in the image from direct light; it's ALL manipulation of the tonalities. I've printed from his original negative on that one, and it's quite astonishing really the changes he worked.
Of course, "Moonrise" was right out on the outer edge for him, in terms of how much darkroom manipulationw as required, and this is largely because it was a "found image" that he had to make in an extremely compressed time span. Look at how many of his landscapes are actually BACKLIT; what dramatic lighting there is, is in the sky. The rest is tonal manipualtion, and he was unearthly good at it.
Robt.
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