On 6 Aug 2004, at 16:13, Kevin Horton wrote:
Ansel Adams must be turning in his grave :-)
Hi
I'm not sure I can agree with that. It is always interesting conjecture to know what the past masters might have done with modern tools and techniques, Trying to bring this back to a digital thread, I suspect that Weston would have fully exploited the use of a digital darkroom.
It is however interesting - in this week that Cartier Bresson died - to examine our ability to capture the decisive moment. I'm sure that any "good" photographer knows what he caught just as he/she pushes the shutter release. How you plan and build your picture is totally dependent on your genre. In some genres (still lives of inanimate objects) the photographer has complete control, this varies across other genres (landscape that Bob mentions - where you have control of the time of day that you choose, but not the weather or an indeterminate action such as a bird flying past - but having control over say a person walking past) to newspaper reportage (which is often highly incident related - eg you can't control whether Michael Owen is going to score a goal or not).
I suspect in Bob's case it's a matter of - having got himself in the right position at the right time of day with the hoped for lighting conditions - taking a picture, not knowing whether in the next 20 secs the cloud, the wind, the bird is going to give him just that bit better image.
2 weeks ago I was in Edinburgh, where I was brought up. I tried to recreate a view of Edinburgh from Arthur Seat that I took in B+W in 69, but the neg of which I have unfortunately lost. It happened to have a seagull flying in a perfect position in the frame. Sure enough - there were Seagulls flying around. I spent 40 minutes (this was only for fun - if it had been a job I would have spent all morning) and probably took 40 images on my D70, each one probably better than the previous, but none (of course) matching EXACTLY what I wanted. If that had been film I would never have done that. And the motor drive certainly helped as the seagull suddenly changed course. Now tell me I was wasting shots - NO. I did check many shots on the LCD - to make sure my understanding of the metering of my relatively new camera was correct - but I already knew what was in the image. Incidentally in 1969 I think I took 2 shots, one without the bird - then a 2nd as it suddenly appeared
I often wonder - how many Cartier Bresson exposures did we never see. he did of course have a wonderful eye and dedication to achieving the decisive moment. But I'm sure he didn't wait till he'd captured 36 decisive moments before he processed the film :-)
Trying to keep this discussion on a digital track.
----------------------- Best, Francis Newman Webshot Ltd, UK
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