Ansel Adams: Frozen Lake and Cliffs, Sierra Nevada, Sequoia National Park, 1932

DREW WILEY

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That was well before he know how to handle high contrast scenes; and whatever the film was, it was incredibly gritty-grained even for that era. Hence some of the charm I guess. It's certainly an important image in terms of getting him to think about how to tame an exposure better. And apparently tricky to print - no two of them seem to be exactly the same. That contradicts the generic description on the linked website, that he "previsualized" the whole thing. Nope; it's well before the Zone System mantra (8 yrs before by his own accounting in his book, Examples), and the negative gave him hell in the darkroom. There is no texture at all in the white lake ice itself. Precipice Lake is right alongside the very popular High Sierra Trail in Sequoia NP. I've never been there - I hate crowded trails. But maybe off-season some year.
 
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DREW WILEY

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For that size print, even Delta 3200 shot in 35mm wouldn't have that much grain today. Like I said, it's part of the charm : in some ways, a forward-looking modern composition; in other ways, still an antique look. The scene is pretty stunning in color too - deep blue-green water. I had friends there a couple years ago.
 

DREW WILEY

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Yes. I would have used a supplementary contrast mask for graded paper. The past two years I've re-printed quite a few of my own early high-contrast ice & rock negatives, before my technique was ideal. Current high-quality VC papers have made most of these quite easy compared to the earlier ordeal. My biggest step forward during graded paper days was when I switched from ordinary developers to staining pyro; that really helped with highlight control. My other current project involves b&w internegs made from early LF color chromes. Got some high mountain scenes of that nature loaded into a couple of enlargers right now, awaiting printing in a couple of days from now when rain is forecast. But it makes me awfully homesick to be back in the real high country again. Lots of those icy scenes no longer exist in the same manner due to most of the glaciers having already disappeared.
 

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Thank you for posting that! It's always nice to see what the photographer had to work with. I've never seen this place before.
 

DREW WILEY

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Indeed. Later in life, he had all kinds of neighbors doing dye transfer printing, which routinely required masking, so no doubt saw it done. But AA's personal tool kit was quite limited. I know that at least one of his assistants, John Sexton, fiddled with masking, but never mastered it. One has to seriously commit to the learning curve to get the most out of it. Later, another assistant, Alan Ross, developed and taught his own masking tweaks for black and white printing. With Ciba printing masking was routine, and that's why I invested in dedicated punch and register gear. But masking for Ciba was more like wielding a sledgehammer, while b&w or color neg masking is more like a gentle violin bow. I personally find masking fun.
 

SchwinnParamount

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John Sexton may not have mastered masking but if you look at his published photographs, you would not conclude that his toolkit was missing the masking technique. Rather, knowing that he was not masking, you would conclude that there was no reason to add it to his toolkit.
 

DREW WILEY

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John - I've stumbled into Sexton and chatted with him a few times long ago, seen actual prints. His printing style trends soft, somewhat quiet. Masking can do all kinds of things if one really understands it. When it's overdone, as is often the case with beginners, it can annoyingly resemble over-sharpening in digital prints. My taste is somewhat different than Sexton, and I can print every bit as good as either him or AA any day of the week, so I can conclude whatever I want to. And to me, quite a bit of his work would look snappier if it had been cautiously masked. But that's not the point - it's how one wants their own prints to look that counts, and Sexton seems to like a bit understatement, though not to anywhere near the degree as Robert Adams, for example (unrelated to AA).

I've been doing this for several decades and have quite a set of relevant skills and specialized equipment. I once routinely masked for color prints; but only about 5% of my black and white negs get masked, mostly being 8x10 negs where I want to bring out extreme nuances of micro-tonality, in effect, enlargements as rich as contact prints. The Precipice Lake image presents a different kind of question regarding how a badly over-contrasty neg might or might not be hypothetically salvaged via masking. The floating lake ice itself seems so dense that the film has shouldered off, and no recoverable texture is even there. I'd reach for a cold tone VC paper before trying masking. They've recovered just about all they can via scanning when remastering the image for sake of mass press reproduction, since very few people can afford original actual prints, and there's not really any detail in the lake ice itself in those either.
 
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Vaughn

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Thanks, Drew, I like your point about the importance of a printer have their own voice. And your assesment of his style seems to be on target.

I was assigned to be Sexton's assistant during a Friends of Photography Workshop (late 80s). I did not do much as he had his own assistant, but I got to hang around, do some small errands, have lunch with Virgina Adams, and that sort of thing. Quite enjoyed the experience. Nice person and the demo was in his darkroom in Carmel Valley. Pretty cool.
 

DREW WILEY

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I've seen Bond's masking results; basic unsharp masking, nothing fancy. Ross has an unusual system that really just modernizes for VC paper what was once commonly done using dye and smudge pencil; I sometimes do supplementary pre-masks that way. Burkett and I had very different protocols for Ciba masking. No sense going into the details because it's now a nearly obsolete process; but masking was nearly always required for hue correction as well as contrast reduction with Ciba.

Working with negative originals rather than chromes requires a much lighter touch, which I liken to power steering. I'm going through some color negs for the upcoming season, seeing if any of them look like they'll need masking, either contrast reduction or contrast addition style. I did several b&w masked 8x10's last month. The improvement in the print tonality is significant, but way too nuanced to convey over the web. It can go over the top if one is not careful, and is trickier to do well with small flimsy 120 film images.

When I mentioned Sexton prints in an understated fashion, that's all relative of course. He doesn't print as dramatically or theatrically like his mentor AA sometimes did, or in that flamboyant baroque style of Bruce Barnbaum with his overexposed, highly compressed negs and subsequent addiction to Farmer's Reducer - an effect which annoys me when its overdone.
 

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“I can print every bit as good as either him or AA any day of the week, so I can conclude whatever I want to”

Classic DREW WILEY! He must display his work under a pseudonym as I have never found his work listed at any gallery. Good for him, I’m glad he is one of the best printers ever.
 

DREW WILEY

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Hard to say what it will look like this summer. Since this is starting to look like a drought year, the trail might be open by June, but probably not mule accessible that soon, like AA traveled. The lake is at 10,300 below a north face, so ice might remain on the lake through June, but snow patches are harder to predict this early in the snow season. The lake would be completely frozen now. Google Earth gives a pretty good idea if you go 3D. The glacier up above is now totally gone, but wasn't very large back then anyway. By July, the Mosquito Air Force will distinctly outnumber the human visitors. The most photogenic sight along the route is Valhalla, or the Angel Wings cliffs. And once over the top of the pass past Precipice Lake, you get the view of the stunning Kaweah peaks. I printed a shot of Kaweah Basin last week. Unlike the popular HIgh Sierra Trail, it's a lot of work getting back in there, with no trail access at all, and pristine solitude reigns.
 
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DREW WILEY

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btaylor - predictable Web Smartass remark. Did my gallery thing long ago, been there done that, big deal, rite of passage or whatever you want to call it - even split a major retrospective with the subject of this particular thread, but so have any number of other photographers at one point or another. You seem to know everything in the art universe already; so maybe you'll become the teakettle expert on Antiques Roadshow. But I wouldn't even put AA on my own A-list of printers. He knew how to communicate his message of light very effectively, but I can think of quite a few better printers. So I hope that disclaimer calms your Art Pope outrage a little bit.
 
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DREW WILEY

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Michael - Ciba was a horribly idiosyncratic color medium. For example, prior to the Fujichrome revolution, Ektachrome 64 was a favorite film among LF photographers, but had rather red contaminated greens, wonderful with complex sage tones, but impossible for getting clean "Spring greens". Dye transfer printers would use a special mask in relation to the respective separation negative, or perhaps mix up a special dye. With Ciba, I'd expose the main contrast mask using a deep magenta filter, which would render the green in the print significantly lighter and more saturated. There were dozens of tricks. I think the most sheets of 8X10 film I've ever used for a single image were 13. That quantity is not uncommon for DT printers; and thankfully, most Cibas could be done with a single mask. The saturation of blue versus yellow could be controlled by the amount of activity during development and bleaching - essentially by varying the drum RPM as needed, a trick impossible with automated processors. Lots of fun stuff. But no sense writing a book about it.
 

Andrew O'Neill

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I agree. It is indeed a very special image. And I love his back story.
 

DREW WILEY

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There are thousands of magical lakes and ponds in the high Sierra. I liked to go in early just as the ice was breaking up, but that's also a hazardous time of year in terms of high runoff and potentially even avalanches. Would cast a line through cracks in the ice and catch huge pink mea freshwater shrimp fed brook trout for dinner. More than once got dunked in ice water streams (all the gear in my pack was thoroughly wrapped in plastic bags just in case). Once spent three nights in an igloo after most of my gear was swept away. Went through the ice once at the end of a long steep skid, after the shaft on my ice axe snapped. Gosh, I'm getting old and lazy now, and wait out both the early thaw and the skeeter season. But I still manage to get more than my fair share of ice shots.

What AA did, which I could not possibly tolerate doing myself, is to take some of these shots during brief breaks in big organized Sierra Club horse trips, which he was in charge of. He had to be the first person up before dawn, and maybe the last to get to sleep too. They had skits and plays in the evening. We locals despised those giant convoys and the litter they left behind, I even witnessed horse racing events in fragile meadows.

Eventually the regulations tightened. No more chopping trees down, limits of the number of people in a party, protection of meadows by re-routing trails around them, no campfires above 10,000 ft, etc. Cattle and sheep grazing up high got restricted around the same time. John Muir called the sheep hoofed locusts; but that's what we locals called the club he founded. Pretty ironic. Just yesterday I was out hiking and taking pictures on a new addition to the John Muir Land Trust just a few miles away, near his mansion.
 
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Vaughn

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michael_r said:
Odd you would characterize John Sexton’s printing style as trending soft...
Click to expand...

I am thinking more along the lines of Quiet Light where 'trending soft' could be thought of as speaking softly but very distinctly, with the opposite being trending bold; speaking with a dramatic and well articulated voice.
 

DREW WILEY

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The Editor of a popular darkroom magazine back then asked me to do a series of Ciba articles right around the time Bond wrote a few b&w masking articles for them. But the editor of a glossy architectural magazine was paying me four times as much per page, so I turned down the photo magazine. I wore a lot of different hats at that time, but had to trim back once family responsibilities kicked in. I still had my own frame shop, and obviously kept making prints, but didn't have the time for gallery gigs anymore.
 

DREW WILEY

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Vaughn, you are correct. I saw some of the original prints used in Quiet Light. But as an official representative of Kodak at that time, Sexton was expected to use their materials : the relatively new TMax 100 film, Kodak label D76, and Kodak Polygrade paper, which itself was a bit on the soft side. Or perhaps I'm thinking of images of his book, Listen to the Trees, or something like that. It was quite awhile ago. I had a long conversation with him once when he approached me as I was shooting at Mono Lake, and he was desperate to get away from some difficult workshop students while they were themselves shooting (shooting themselves in the foot, apparently).
 

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Perhaps that is more along with what I had in mind, michael, although I really cannot separate the two (printing style/light). Sexton's the one who turned me on to using reciposity failure of the film to boost contrast...quiety, of course.
 

DREW WILEY

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Recip failure during long exposures can do all kinds of weird things with contrast, depending on the specific film and filter involved. That becomes quite apparent when learning to make color separation negatives. For example, relative to films like FP4, Super XX, and Bergger 200, a blue filter will yield much lower contrast than red or green, requiring more development time with that specific negative, and then it can still might be impossible to fully catch up. With TMY400, it's the green exposure that lags somewhat behind red and blue in terms of long exposure contrast. The only film iI've found where all three separation match in gamma at a particular long exposure sweet spot is TMX100; and it was apparently engineered with that purpose in mind to begin with, as a replacement film to Super XX back when dye transfer printing was still half alive. Milder filters like orange or yellow or yellow-green would have to be tested in each case for the specific effect. And films like ACROS or Efke 25 are orthopan, so would have significant idiosyncrasies in this respect.
 

DREW WILEY

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Michael, the so-called "West Coast esthetic" involved all kinds of printing styles, all the way from very delicate to extremely bold, sometimes by the same person. There was no rule about it. A number of those folks were still around when I was exhibiting in the same neighborhood. I guess I could myself be termed a second or third generation West School type, because I too trend toward sharp crisp images and careful printing; some are very high key and delicate, almost impossible to convey over the web, while many others are rather bold, though I have only a handful of "black skies", and never was a clone, disciple, or student of AA. I never even saw a real print of his until I was already exhibiting my own work. I had seen some Edward Weston prints when I was young.

Don Worth would have been a good example of extremes. He was especially known for dramatic foliage close-ups. But I've seen huge prints of his almost white on off-white, totally high key, then many with dramatic deep blacks versus brilliant highlights, then his big highly detailed richly hued studio shadow-box Cibachromes (way too 2-dimensional for my taste, but well executed).

Some of AA's assistants followed in a similar vein, like Sexton and Alan Ross; some went a completely different direction.
There are just too many stereotypes on threads like this. Pirkle Jones is best known for his documentary street photography of the Black Panther movement. Rondal Partridge made a lot of quirky soft-focus platinum prints of interesting objects, almost the antithesis of the f/64 concept; he passed away in the house of a friend of mine just a few years ago, and they're trying to figure out what to do with all those stacks of prints - he was still printing in his 90's. AA certainly wasn't the only center of gravity when it came to influence back then - another stereotype that needs to be shattered.
 
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