Winter Walking in Derbyshire

During the recent cold snap at the beginning of December, I enjoyed a day walking with my brother and a friend.  We walked along Derwent Edge above the Ladybower and Derwent Reservoirs.  It had snowed over night and we were blessed with wonderful conditions and stunning views.  I was also able to take some images for Project 35:using a polarising filter.

Water cascades over the Derwent Dam.  I was pleased to be able to include the crescent moon in the shot.

Looking towards Kinder Scout from Back Tor.  Thinking of Ansel Adams I have increased the contrast between the white clouds and the sky, darkening the blue sky.  I also used the shadows slider to give deep rich black shadows on the rocks.

The same view as above but with a walker in the shot to provide scale and perspective.

Back Tor from The Edge.

Looking along Derwent Edge against the light.

Looking back along the Edge towards White Tor.

The Wheelstones.

Assignment 4: a critical review; Ansel Adams

After much thought I have decided to use Ansel Adams as my subject for Assignment 4's critical review.  Of the suggested photographers I quickly dismissed Robert Adams.  Although socially important, perhaps of the same genre as John Kippin and Chris Wainright in' Furtureland' and 'Futureland Now' and certainly in tune with Henri Cartier-Bresson when he criticised Ansel Adams and Edward Weston for playing about photographing rocks and trees when the world was going to pieces, it is not a style of photography I enjoy.  I think that John Fowles would be approving of his work as he says in his introduction to Fay Godwin's 'Land' how he dislikes a lot of Landscape Photography as it portrays the world as a falsely beautiful place and the practitioners ignore the ugly in the world.  Fay certainly did not ignore the mundane and the ugly but she does manage to make it look beautiful at the same time.  I was tempted to use Fay as the subject of my essay for this reason and also as I am familiar of many of the landscapes she portrays.  She was also a walker and a president of the Ramblers Association.  I also really love the work of Galen Rowell who was also a mountaineer and visited many of the remote regions of the world.  I like his approach where he deliberately rated his film stock at a higher ISO than it actually was in order to achieve richly saturated colours.  I really enjoy the rich black and white images of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston.  I decided to choose Adams partly because I like his images but also because I have a fascination with Yosemite, although I have never been to America never mind Yosemite itself.  My fascination with the valley, though, began more years ago than I care to remember when I was a member of my college mountaineering society.  During that time Mick Burke (later killed on Everest) came to give a lecture on 'Big Wall Climbing' and showed many fabulous images of Yosemite Valley.  I was smitten and it wasn't long afterwards before I came across the work of Ansel Adams.  In his youth Adams was also a mountaineer and this, too, drew me to him.  I have thought about current landscape photographers such as Joe Cornish or David Noton but felt that Ansel Adams was more seminal.

I include here my first thoughts on my review.

Brief biography
Why I chose him
Influences, Early years and Yosemite/Pictorialsm v. Modernism
Other work - i.e. conservation, and letters
Group F64
Previsualisation and Equivalence
Zone system
Style of photography - Sharp focus through out, rich b&w, exposing/printing for the highlights and reducing shadows to nearly black, smooth papers
Colour work
His importance. In his lifetime often hard up for money and not really publicised until he was nearly in his 70s.
His lasting influence

Ansel Adams: Photography from the Mountains to the Sea. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. December 14th 2012

This major exhibition of Ansel Adams work features images that I am familiar with but also many that were new to me.  It focuses on one of Adams' favourite subjects: water.  The exhibition explores water in all its forms, from turbulent views of rapids and waterfalls to quieter more restful scenes of rivers and lakes.  As the exhibition title suggests there are images of water in all stages of the water cycle: clouds, mountain steams and also ice and snow in the mountains, lowland lakes and rivers and finally the sea.  We also see images of geysers, notably 'Old Faithful' taken in Yellowstone National Park.  The exhibition is divided into sections which cover all of these areas and each begins with a delightful quote from the great man.  There are also excerpts from two documentary films which I have since found on You Tube and look forward to watching in full.  The size of the images displayed ranges from tiny prints of some of his very early work to huge prints that he produced for the American Trust Company building in San Francisco in the 1950s.  These were so large that the only way that he could print them he hung sheets of printing paper on the wall of his darkroom and then projected the image from his enlarger horizontally across the darkroom.  Because the final size of the images was to be larger than any paper available he printed them in sections and carefully joined them together.  If the prints are carefully observed the joins can still be seen.  Unusually the photographs are sepia toned with egg-yolk brown to complement the warmth of the ornate interior of the room in which they were to be hung.  All of the images in the exhibition are originals printed by Adams himself, with the exception of one.

We begin with his early forays into photography with his box brownie.  At first his photographs are influenced by the Pictorialists who made pictures that looked like paintings or drawings.  Edward Weston was to refer to the Pictorialists as those 'Fuzzy Wuzzies'.  Gradually, and particularly after the First World War, a harder-edged style of photography developed which became known as Photographic Modernism.  Adams was one of the leading figures in this new movement.  We hear later in the exhibition of the F64 Group formed by Adams, Weston and Imogen Cunningham.  The group took its name from f-stop 64, the smallest aperture available and which produced the sharpest images across the whole image.  This characterised Adams work, especially after 1932.

We learn that Adams liked to take and display sequences of images.  Examples of this in the exhibition are his Surf Sequence, Shipwreck series and a series of images of Old Faithful, the geyser in Yellowstone National Park. 

When photographing the turbulence of surf or mountain streams  Adams liked to use a fast shutter speed in order to freeze the spray.  The exhibition tells us that he 'Froze Motion in Time'.  Although he does use longer exposures to produce motion blur as in Early Morning Merced River, Yosemite Valley taken in 1950, he more often than not tires to freeze moving water, whether it be waterfalls, rapids or surf.  I wonder if today with the trend in ultra long exposures, often facilitated by Lee's 'Big Stopper' ND filter, some photographers hark back to Pictorialsm with their painterly images.  Personally I feel that both have a place and neither style should be adopted to the exclusion of the other in order to achieve variety.  An example of an image where he really captures 'water frozen in time' is 'Wave' taken on Pebble Beach, California in 1968.  The breaking surf is frozen beautifully and every drop can be seen; it sparkles against the light.  The water is also perfectly exposed whilst the background is dark, almost black.  We are told that he achieved this during the printing process, printing the shadows very dark so they are nearly back.  The initial exposure is also carefully calculated using his 'Zone System'.  In fact he frowned on exposure bracketing stating in the documentary that "Bracketing is a sign of insecurity.  You don't really know what you are doing!".
Sometimes even his fasted exposure were not quick enough to freeze all motion and we see some slight motion blur in shots such as those of Upper Yosemite Falls.  One quote says "In capturing bursting spray from rocks the photographer must be hair trigger alert for the moment."  We are reminded of Cartier-Bresson's 'decisive moment'.  Adams also says "A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.".

Adam's didn't always photograph expansive wide-angled views, often excluding the horizon and concentrating on the 'Intimate Landscape', reminiscent of Eliot Porter.  The images of Snow and Ice in the exhibition are richly black and white and largely feature no horizon.  There is even a section entitled Surface and Texture which, while not exactly macro shot, are very definitely close-ups.  All are incredibly detailed.  Another of his quotes in this section says, "We must remember that a photograph can hold just as much as we put into it, and no one has ever approached the full possibilities of the medium.

In the section on Waterfalls we read that Adams believes that we can express experience and feelings through photography.  He refers to this a s 'Equivalency', meaning that the image should express the photographer's emotional state at the time it was made.  He says, "When I see something I react to it and I state it, and that's the equivalent of what I felt. So I give it to you as a spectator, and you get it or you don't get it, but there's nothing on the back of the print that tells you what you should get!".  In Waterwheel Falls, Yosemite, c1948, Adams returns to the valley after an assignment in Hawaii which he didn't enjoy and disaffected with the art world.  The picture shows the fall in spate; 'a thunderous, pulsating torrent, with crosscurrents erupting in fountains of spray.  It conveys the elation he felt in the presence of nature and his delight at being back in Yosemite.'.

In the two documentary extracts we learn that Adams was one of the first people to realise that the environment would become a social issue.  Before him photographers such as Dorothea Lange were social documentary photographers concentrating on the social issues of the time such as homelessness and the Great Depression.  In fact Cartier-Bresson said, " While the world is going to pieces, Weston and Adams photograph rocks and trees.  We also learn in the documentaries about the fastidious way he worked in the darkroom in order to produce prints just as he visualised them.  He would often print the same negative several times with a different result each time.  He likened photography to music, referring to the negative as the musical score which is fixed and the print as the orchestral performance which is open to interpretation.  It is during the documentaries that we also learn that he prints for the highlights, especially in water, often reducing the shadow to nearly black.  We hear him looking to the future and predicting the digital revolution and being excited by the idea. 

Towards the end of the exhibition is one of my all time favourite Adams photographs is 'Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite c1937.  One of his most famous images it is generally thought to be a dramatic image of Yosemite Valley.  It is, however, a wonderful example of a photograph of water in all its forms: massive storm clouds, rain sweeping in, ice and snow on the high ground and Bridalveil Fall.  Vapour, liquid, solid.

Edinburgh at Night

I recently spent the weekend in Edinburgh staying with my son who is also into photography.  We had been planning to indulge in some night photography around the city and, as it was the Christmas Market and Fair, it seemed  a good opportunity.  All of the images were taken using a tripod, mirror lock up and electronic release.

I took this image just about Grassmarket at sunset.  I deliberately exposed for the sky to show the rich colours and also to reduce the buildings to a silhouette.

The castle.  I exposed for the castle and then, in Lightroom 4, used an ND Grad to bring out some detail in the shy but used the shadows slider to recover a little detail in the foreground.

I liked the contrast in temperature here with the cool colours of the floodlit castle contrasting with the warm lighting on the fountain in the foreground.

A sunset shot of Victoria Street above Grassmarket.  Here I took 3 images exposing for sky, shadows and midtones and then blended them in post processing.

Again I liked the contrast between cool and warm colours.  The window of opportunity to get the deep blue in the sky at twilight was about 10 minutes.

Another image taken at the same location as above.  Here I converted it to monochrome and then sepia toned it and added a little grain.

Light trails from traffic in Victoria Street.

Again another image at the same location converted to black and white and sepia toned in Lightroom.

Christmas in Princess Street Gardens.  Perhaps a little distant and too many black areas.

I zoomed in somewhat to concentrate on the action.  I had to time the shot carefully to catch the decisive moment when the carousel and big wheel were both stationary.

A fun shot zooming during the exposure.

The casltle from Calton Hill.

Princess Street from Calton Hill.  This time I opted to expose while the big wheel was truning to poduce a circle of light.

Joel Meyerowitz: Cape Light

When I first looked through this book my initial impression that these were not my taste in photography.  At first they reminded me of a faded 70s look that I didn't appreciate.  However, the more I looked through them the more I came to appreciate them.  Not all have that faded look and many are in fact rich and saturated which is what I prefer.  Some are sharp right through in the Ansel Adams mode whereas others are soft and pastel with a painterly feel to them, perhaps more reminiscent of the portraitists from the early years of the 20th century.  When I visited Ansel Adams' exhibition in Greenwich 'Photography from the Mountains to the Sea' I was interested to see that a few of the images there were also taken at Cape Cod.  In fact 'Churches', taken in Truro, Cape Cod reminded me very much of some Meyerowitz's images of clapboard buildings.  In this book, I liked the way that he has taken several images of the same scene at different times of day and in different lighting.  It is amazing how the view changes.  One example of this is the Bay/Sky series taken on the beach at Provincetown.  I also like the way that he has used longer exposures to introduce movement into some images such as Cocktail Party taken at Wellfleet where most of the figures have sight movement blue but the girl who seems to be the main  focus of the shot has stood totally still and is pin sharp.  Another example is the picture of washing drying on a Clothes line in Provincetown.  It is obviously a windy day and, although everything else in the image is pin sharp the exposure was long enough to create movement blur in the washing.

In his forward to the book, Clifford S Ackley (associate curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) tells us that many of the images have a frankly poetic or romantic flavour.  He goes on to say that Joel Meyerowitz explores the different light of Cape Cod and often took the same scene in different conditions.  He tells us that he successfully made the jump from monochrome street photography to early colour landscapes.  He also moved from 35mm to a large 8x10 field camera.

The book then moves on to record a conversation between Meyerowitz and Bruce MacDonald (Dean of the Museum School and a personal friend).  In his brief introduction to this conversation (a format chosen rather than a more formal introduction) MacDonald says that all of Joel's work is characterised by a balance of craft and feeling.  Craft includes deft manipulation of camera and darkroom equipment, interaction with subjects and aesthetic judgements about shape, colour, picture edge, sequencing and all the other aspects of seeing photographically.  Feeling is the emotional response to experience.  He says of Meyerowitz that he has the courage or fearlessness to allow the sensation of experience, especially visual experience, to flow through him at much higher amperage than most of us.  He has become so sensitive that vision itself is now his subject.

At the beginning of the conversation between then, MacDonald explores Joel's early life and career.  We learn of his Bronx upbringing and how his father taught him to box in order to be able to look after himself on the streets.  He relates how this upbringing helped his early career as a street photographer.  The conversation moves on to why Meyerowitz is now using colour and 8x10 format.  He says that he wanted to see and experience more feelings from a photograph and he wanted larger images that would more fully describe things and with greater cohesion.  Slow-speed colour film provided that.  When asked what inspires him to take a photograph, he replies that it is instinctive.  He suggests that sometimes he can be standing in front of something so entranced that he almost forgets to press the shutter until he tries to tear himself away.  It's at that breakaway moment, when he wants to move with the camera that he realises; 2Stay!  You're being spoken to - answer!"

MacDonald asks him about the difference between black and white and colour.  Joel tells us that colour is responsive to the full spectrum of light, whereas black and white is sensitive to a much narrower wavelength, similar to the rods and cones in our eyes and why at night we only see in shades of black and grey but with a long enough exposure the camera will record all colours as seen in Project 27.  He goes on to say that black and white expresses light as a matter of intensity; there is no meaning attached to the light.  Colour makes everything more interesting and he even suggests that light itself is a subject.  He tells us that his work on Cape Cod is about light.  MacDonald suggests that compared to his monochrome work, these images have a simplicity.  "Less is more", he says.  The conversation regarding his inspiration continues and we learn that the images are all about colour, light and shapes and come from within.  This is comparable with Adams' comment in Examples that "Professional work depends on assignments from without, whereas creative work stems from assignments from within."  Another of Adams' comments concurs with Meyerowitz, when he says "I can only say that I photograph what appears aesthetically beautiful and what I can visualise as a photograph worth creating for myself and, I hope, for others."  In other words Ansel Adams' work also comes from within.  Joel also tells us that when he sees the image upside down on the ground glass focusing screen, he sees a different image and this inspires him to take the shot.

Meyerowitz is asked who influenced him.  His first influence and the man who made him resign as an art director, buy a camera and go out on the streets was Robert Frank.  He then mentions people he met on the streets of New York and worked alongside.  People such as Lee Friedlander, Dianne Arbus and especially Garry Winogrand.  He reserves special mention, though, for his meetings with Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Truly inspirational images and a fascinating read.