Andrew O'Neill
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AA made Moon and Half Dome with his Hasselblad.
Ansel Adams Film and Method
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You're right Andy, and it shows you what 2 1/4" sq., plus an excellent lens can do. Wasn't even one of those fancy-dancy Superachromat jobs either.
Thank you, please do. Do you live in vicinity of the valley?
About 400 miles to the north and a bit west, but I get there a couple times a year I and am overdue a visit. I am represented by the Gallery and give workshops there once a year. But if I get definite news one way or the other, I'll post it.
I had a platinum/palladium printing session yesterday at home -- made a few 5x7 prints from 5x7 negs that I have 'owed' family and friends for awhile (including a group 5x7 on top of Sentinal Dome from a family reunion), plus a few from a recent trip to Scotland with the Rolleicord.
Here an okay scan of a print from yesterday -- a sculpture in Scotland (30 meters/100' tall) of kelpies. Always like tossing in an image with a post.
Edit to correct: Yes, Half Dome and Moon is a Hassy image. I do not know how it is printed for t he Special Editions.
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I just thought I would share this Ansel Adams "image". Approximately thirty years ago while visiting my daughter who was living in LA at the time we passed a building with a wall facing an alley. I just happened to notice the wall and had her turn around and go back. Fortunately I had my camera with me and made this image. I wondered how many people ever recognized it and why it was painted facing an alley and if it still even exists. It was painted in color photographed with 2 1/4 Tri-X As i recall it was at least 20ft or more in height.
It rarely feels good to be connected with wall art, understanding what it relates to and appreciating it. Usually it will be some kind of woke art or something unrelatable.
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The moon and Half Dome image just holds up to 16X20 size; it wouldn't look right bigger, since in effect it's only a 645 rectangle. I recall it as a Pan X shot with a long lens on a Hassie, where they skiied a few miles for that particular perspective. Its often seen on postcards. But it is no doubt among the pictures discussed in Examples.
I was up there for an afternoon a few days ago while the air was clear due to afternoon rains. I'm sure forest fire smoke has drifted in since. Didn't bother dropping down into Yosemite Valley itself. I was doing almost entirely MF tele work all week long, with only a couple of 4x5 shots.
I was up there for an afternoon a few days ago while the air was clear due to afternoon rains. I'm sure forest fire smoke has drifted in since. Didn't bother dropping down into Yosemite Valley itself. I was doing almost entirely MF tele work all week long, with only a couple of 4x5 shots.
I just went through your album, the photos have a characteristic look. Do you make use of Pyrocat developer with stand development, or is this a lith process?
I sometimes use PMK Pyro but mainly ID11 no stand development All by Ilford times unless I know I need more contrast up front With my pt/pd I use my own recipe I use Ilford HP5 for 4x5 and Delta400 for 2 1/4 occasionally Delta100. Nothing exotic since I like to keep it simple. For pt/pd negatives I use the HP5 or enlarge on to x-ray duplicating film or Pictorico and print on Arches Platine. For silver I print on Ilford multigrade fiber and digital on either Moab Juniper or Hahnemuhle cotton glossy with Epson Ultrachrome ink on a 3880 from Photoshop files. I use a Toyo field camera, Hasselblad, Titan pinhole, Nikon dslr and Panasonic ZS100. I concentrate on composition and a quality print and pleasing myself. If others like what I do I appreciate it.
Comes out really good, especially I like the separations of the shadows, on those prints of plants, where there are shades of black. That is difficult to get right.
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Many years ago at a workshop, Ted Orland (who was Adams's assistant at the time) said the Special Edition prints from 8 x 10 negatives were done by projection at 1:1.
David
David
Thanks, David...I have been wrong many times before this!
Well I should have included the caveat that this is a memory of something that happened over 40 years ago...
David
Drew. I just checked my copy of “EXAMPLES” he was driving towards the Ahwahnee Hotel on a winter afternoon at about 3:30 when he saw the scene. It was taken on Panatomic X with a Hasselblad and 250mm with an orange filter. He made prints from 8x10 to 30x40.
Ansel built an 8x10 enlarger and made 16x20 and larger projection prints from his 8x10 negatives, as well.
Ok then maybe that's why the lady from the gallery told me they are not contact prints. Probably because there are so many of them being made that it could wear out the emulsion on the glass plate. But a 1:1 enlargement will probably be as good as a contact print anyways.
Anybody knows if the following are from 8x10 negs:
Mt. Ansel Adams, Lyell Fork
Overview Of all the American landscapes that Ansel Adams immortalized through his images, Yosemite was the most deeply personal. In Yosemite he discovered his spiritual home and built his family. He first visited the Park in 1916 and he returned every year thereafter, meeting his wife there and...
shop.anseladams.com
Tenaya Creek, Dogwood, Rain
Overview Of all the American landscapes that Ansel Adams immortalized through his images, Yosemite was the most deeply personal. In Yosemite he discovered his spiritual home and built his family. He first visited the Park in 1916 and he returned every year thereafter, meeting his wife there and...
shop.anseladams.com
Vernal Fall
Overview Of all the American landscapes that Ansel Adams immortalized through his images, Yosemite was the most deeply personal. In Yosemite he discovered his spiritual home and built his family. He first visited the Park in 1916 and he returned every year thereafter, meeting his wife there and...
shop.anseladams.com
Merced River, Cliffs, Autumn
Overview Of all the American landscapes that Ansel Adams immortalized through his images, Yosemite was the most deeply personal. In Yosemite he discovered his spiritual home and built his family. He first visited the Park in 1916 and he returned every year thereafter, meeting his wife there and...
shop.anseladams.com
Of course it's possible that over the years printing practices changed and maybe in later years (or for that matter, earlier years) some were contact printed. Thing is doing multiple prints by projection at 1:1 vs, contact printing will involve a lot less handling of the negative and less opportunity for things like dust intrusion.
David
David
Each print has more info on it in the links ("About This Image).
Tenaya Creek, Dogwood, Rain was a 2 second exposure with an 8x10. My favorite AA image...and one of the first I saw of AA's in real life, so to speak, at the Weston Gallery, Carmel. I had gotten a scholarship to attend a Friends of Photography workshop back in the 80s. The light is similar to what I work with under the redwoods, I love the tonality of the rocks (envious, actually), and all so nicly put together.
Vernal Falls is from '48 with a 4x5...neat.
I don't remember reading anything much about Ansel Adams contact printing, but there have been lots of photos of his horizontal enlarger. And the fact that there are so many AA enlargements leads me to believe he or his assistants would have used 1:1 printing for the volume of work produced for sale.
MattKing
Moderator
I was under the impression that many of the Ansel Adams prints that are available in quantity were prepared by first making enlarged copy negatives which incorporate any necessary dodging and burning, and then using those copy negatives to contact print the resulting prints.
That would explain the talk we had by one of AA's assistants in that early FoP workshop I was in. We were sitting in AA's living room (after AA's death, around 1986 or so) and the assistant was showing us all the 8x10 negative of Moonrise. And then he fumbled it and almost dropped it -- to everyone's massive shock, and his smile. Obviously (and hopefully) it was a copy negative.
I didn't see the "About This Image" link, thanks for pointing that out, so I know for sure which is 8x10. There's something about the Tenaya Creek image, it does not look catchy but something intriguing about it, like a B&W oil painting. Maybe I will get this one.
ok I just ordered Tenaya Creek, lets see what happens.
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Jeffry - Thanks. I finally got around to looking it up in my own copy of Examples. But I meant it when I said that it barely holds up to 16X20 enlargement. Yeah, at some point, some NP or related Govt event might have ordered up a commercially made 30X40 enlargement from that tiny 645 neg; but even prints that size made from his 8x10 negs are complete fuzz if approached closer than 10 ft away. Yeah, Pan X was a fine grained film; but Hassie teles of that vintage certainly aren't equal to comparable options today.
Few people have been as close to a large quantity of AA's big "mural" sized prints as I have been (again, not in the sense of mural scale today, and rather meaning 30X40 to 40X60 at most, and not even printed by himself). Of course, nowadays the AA trust could probably deliver a press or inkjet repro of any number of images on large scale; but that kind of thing would be sold and priced more like quality decor rather than anything seriously collectible.
And what he considered successful in that size must be taken in the context of what was feasible to him at the time. Don't expect it to look anything like what Bradford Washburn could order up given his precision aerial cameras and access to research and scientific grade printing facilities around the same time. Even today, under the best of circumstances, one would have to back off quite a bit from that amount of enlargement for it to look sharp.
Matt - Ansel and his crew were not properly equipped to make any kind of precision duplicates free of dodging and burning purgatory. In recent decades, Alan Ross has made some of his own style of accessory masking sheets to facilitate easier printing of certain of those old negs, especially with reference to newer VC papers. Commercial press reproductions, however, do all that post-scanning.
And Vaughn - no, that was probably not a duplicate! Given that something like 360 prints have been sold of that Moonrise neg, plus who knows how many unsuccessful ones, it was probably well beaten up at that point. And then you have the ones which marginally survived his studio fire and all the water putting it out, like Gates of the Valley. Printing some of those must have been an atrociously complicated task, just like he claimed. And if you've seen any of the versions of Moonrise prior to him intensifying the neg for sake of that black sky look, there are all kinds of evident problems with unevenness due to water bath development. But being the more vintage example, the few of those remaining seem to fetch the highest collector pricing.
kfed- probably all of those were 8x10 shots, and all on relatively modern safety film. Glass plates ended long before. You'd have to ask Alan Ross how he specifically prints them. I was in the exact spot of that Lyell Fork shot less than a decade ago. The water has filled in somewhat, though it's still a soggy meadow with lovely tall grass. And I had an entirely different kind of lighting - much higher key and gorgeous in its own right. He was there both in his 20's and later in his 40's, when that particular shot was taken. He was skilled enough with mules to get them at least that far in, carrying his gear. For me it was a six day hike in from the south carrying a 75 lb pack, and another six back out. Ansel would have taken a long detour around the intervening headwall cliff all the way up the Merced River from Yos Valley itself. Besides me and my sidekick, nobody else was around for days on end. It's the "other" Yosemite, and quite capable of defending itself from intrusive crowds.
Few people have been as close to a large quantity of AA's big "mural" sized prints as I have been (again, not in the sense of mural scale today, and rather meaning 30X40 to 40X60 at most, and not even printed by himself). Of course, nowadays the AA trust could probably deliver a press or inkjet repro of any number of images on large scale; but that kind of thing would be sold and priced more like quality decor rather than anything seriously collectible.
And what he considered successful in that size must be taken in the context of what was feasible to him at the time. Don't expect it to look anything like what Bradford Washburn could order up given his precision aerial cameras and access to research and scientific grade printing facilities around the same time. Even today, under the best of circumstances, one would have to back off quite a bit from that amount of enlargement for it to look sharp.
Matt - Ansel and his crew were not properly equipped to make any kind of precision duplicates free of dodging and burning purgatory. In recent decades, Alan Ross has made some of his own style of accessory masking sheets to facilitate easier printing of certain of those old negs, especially with reference to newer VC papers. Commercial press reproductions, however, do all that post-scanning.
And Vaughn - no, that was probably not a duplicate! Given that something like 360 prints have been sold of that Moonrise neg, plus who knows how many unsuccessful ones, it was probably well beaten up at that point. And then you have the ones which marginally survived his studio fire and all the water putting it out, like Gates of the Valley. Printing some of those must have been an atrociously complicated task, just like he claimed. And if you've seen any of the versions of Moonrise prior to him intensifying the neg for sake of that black sky look, there are all kinds of evident problems with unevenness due to water bath development. But being the more vintage example, the few of those remaining seem to fetch the highest collector pricing.
kfed- probably all of those were 8x10 shots, and all on relatively modern safety film. Glass plates ended long before. You'd have to ask Alan Ross how he specifically prints them. I was in the exact spot of that Lyell Fork shot less than a decade ago. The water has filled in somewhat, though it's still a soggy meadow with lovely tall grass. And I had an entirely different kind of lighting - much higher key and gorgeous in its own right. He was there both in his 20's and later in his 40's, when that particular shot was taken. He was skilled enough with mules to get them at least that far in, carrying his gear. For me it was a six day hike in from the south carrying a 75 lb pack, and another six back out. Ansel would have taken a long detour around the intervening headwall cliff all the way up the Merced River from Yos Valley itself. Besides me and my sidekick, nobody else was around for days on end. It's the "other" Yosemite, and quite capable of defending itself from intrusive crowds.
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