Ansel Adams - Moonrise in Santa Fe (actually "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico")

[ericB&W]

I have the book where Ansel Adams explain the making of this photo.
I have found this link https://www.anseladams.com/ansel-adams-anecdotes/ so not to rewrite the book page from where is taken.
What i can't understand is how is possible that he used 1 second at f/32 with asa 64 film plus a filter factor 3x to photograph the moon
and the photo is not dark.

 

[BrianShaw]

It’s not the print that you want to evaluate but, rather, the negative. Keep searching as there is a lot of information on that image, it’s making, the negative and processing, and the variety of printings.

 

[Sirius Glass]

The negative is quite flat and takes a lot of dodging and burning to make the prints that we see of it.

 

[DREW WILEY]

There are various places he told the story. I recommend his book, Examples. It took him quite awhile to arrive at the black-sky version of printing it. I've seen prints made prior to that, and their less dense skies exhibit a lot of processing streaks and so forth, characteristic of the water bath development he used. Anyway, it wasn't taken in Santa Fe, but the small town of Hernandez NM.

 

[Vaughn]

Well, the moon is as about as bright as a sunny landscape.

 

[BrianShaw]

Basically, it was a flawed negative that he whipped into shape!

Many decades ago I saw an exhibit of his prints in different iterations over time. Friends of Photography Gallery near Moscone Center. Both long gone it seems. It really made me wonder which version he actually visualized when he clicked the shutter. LOL

 

[GregY]

I've seen several prints over time at the Andrew Smith Gallery back when it was in Santa Fe. Not to be a stickler but the photos was taken in Hernandez..... 30 miles (50 km) north of Santa Fe.....a place that no longer looks anything like the scene AA. photographed....though the church is still standing. If you're ever in N America Eric, I'll buy you a tequila

 

[Don_ih]

a place that no longer looks anything like the scene AA photographed....

Looks the same to me....

(this is a guess)

 

[Vaughn]

Basically, it was a flawed negative that he whipped into shape!

Many decades ago I saw an exhibit of his prints in different iterations over time. Friends of Photography Gallery near Moscone Center. Both long gone it seems. It really made me wonder which version he actually visualized when he clicked the shutter. LOL

Probably just playing the written music differently as skills, experience, and outlook on life grew.

 

[BTC]

There are various places he told the story. I recommend his book, Examples. It took him quite awhile to arrive at the black-sky version of printing it. I've seen prints made prior to that, and their less dense skies exhibit a lot of processing streaks and so forth, characteristic of the water bath development he used. Anyway, it wasn't taken in Santa Fe, but the small town of Hernandez NM.

I was hoping ‘Examples’ would include more images of negatives or straight prints but it doesn’t. Ansel does usually explain the moment of the image to the best of his memory and will talk about the development and printing of the image.

 

[Bill Burk]

Moon is 256 footcandles, the “exposure formula” tells you to take the square root of your ASA 64 -> 8 as your f/stop.

Then you use the footcandles as your shutter speed.

1/250 at f/8 for starters. Equivalent of 1/15 at f/32

That places the moon on Zone V, did he say he wants it brighter so 1/8 for Zone VI, 1/4 for Zone VII

Get the filter factor in there, is that between one and two stops.. Voila you’re at a second.

What made the image spectacular was the late afternoon sunlight reflecting off shiny things in the graveyard. That’s what caught his eye and was what he was lucky enough to setup and shoot.

Quite a pleasant way to wrap up an afternoon out taking pictures.

 

[BrianShaw]

Probably just playing the written music differently as skills, experience, and outlook on life grew.

That’s exactly what he said… or what was said.

 

[Sirius Glass]

Well, the moon is as about as bright as a sunny landscape.

If one includes the fact that the light source is the same as day light and the albedo of the Moon, the Moon exposure is about one f/stop less than Sunny 16.

 

[Chuck1]

I think he had a contact at nasa it's in one if his books

 

[pbromaghin]

I think he had a contact at nasa it's in one if his books

Whaaaaat? This was 17 years before NASA existed.

 

[Bill Burk]

Jim Alinder had a dup neg of Moonrise taped to a window inside door of his gallery near Mendicino. He showed it to me when we visited several years back.

There’s almost nothing on the negative.

 

[BrianShaw]

Photo Manipulation - Ansel Adams and Group f/64 - Harold Hall Photography

Radical may be too strong of a word for Ansel Adams and his photographer friends. They represented an opposite view of photography at the time.

www.haroldhallphotography.com

 

[ericB&W]

Jim Alinder had a dup neg of Moonrise taped to a window inside door of his gallery near Mendicino. He showed it to me when we visited several years back.

There’s almost nothing on the negative.

This is what i mean, if i take a photo with that exposition i get a negative almost
tranparent and there is , i think , non magic developing chemical formula that can
dramatically improve the result, so it is all a work of dodging and burning at highest levels
of skilfuness to squeeze out a such contrasted image .

 

[takilmaboxer]

Well, it was 1941 and he was using an 8X10 camera. In the modern world, if he'd had a handheld camera with a built in light meter, he could have jumped out of his car and snapped off a dozen shots, bracketing exposures and compositions, in the time it took to get one 8X10 shot. So it was quite the technical achievement. In fact I've often wondered if his traveling companions had a folder in their pocket and got their own version of "Moonrise".
Don_ih, I live in New Mexico and I can assure you the scene looks very different today, as well it should after 80 years. The biggest impression is the abject poverty of Hernandez. And with F350 trucks barrelling down that two lane road at 80 mph, pulling over to get the shot would carry an element of danger!

 

[DREW WILEY]

He very briefly calculated the exposure to obtain the exposure for the correct textural value of the moon. But the light was rapidly changing and he didn't have time to read other important values, especially in the foreground, so he basically winged it, guessing the rest, and assigned it water bath development trying to salvage something down there in the foreground shadows. Hypothetical bracketing wouldn't have do a damn thing better unless the whole exposure sequence were digitally overlapped and then smashed together and re-tweaked - Thank goodness that lazy default option wasn't invented yet, or there never would have been a masterpiece to discuss. A correctly bracketed shot for the foreground would have blown out the moon, and shouldered it off the curve into blank white. As it is, hard to say whether he did any of the exposure ideally. It was obviously a very difficult shot to print, and he eventually resorted to intensifying the neg.

Lots of people know how to get a correct exposure of a full moon just through prior experimentation with this or that particular film. No miracle there. But it is an interesting anecdote, possibly needing to be taken with a grain of salt.

About a decade ago I bagged a very similarly lit shot, likewise in a rush pulling off the highway with no time to spare. Didn't even have time to fiddle with the view camera, so I took it with my P67 on tripod, using Acros. No problem with the scene contrast range : everything from full moon texture to shimmering clouds, all the way down into deep rich shadows. Just a couple quick reads with the spotmeter, and understanding my film well. Today we have amenities Ansel didn't, including some marvelous VC papers. One correct shot; no need to bracket. No hell printing it like AA had to contend with. Yeah, I would have liked to have used a bigger format myself, and if the lighting had stayed constant I could have. But several seconds off, plus or minus, and the scene simply wouldn't have been there.

 

[Chan Tran]

Well, it was 1941 and he was using an 8X10 camera. In the modern world, if he'd had a handheld camera with a built in light meter, he could have jumped out of his car and snapped off a dozen shots, bracketing exposures and compositions, in the time it took to get one 8X10 shot. So it was quite the technical achievement. In fact I've often wondered if his traveling companions had a folder in their pocket and got their own version of "Moonrise".
Don_ih, I live in New Mexico and I can assure you the scene looks very different today, as well it should after 80 years. The biggest impression is the abject poverty of Hernandez. And with F350 trucks barrelling down that two lane road at 80 mph, pulling over to get the shot would carry an element of danger!

He did want to bracket but he had time for only 1 shot. The exposure wasn't to his liking but he made it worked.

 

[DREW WILEY]

He wanted to take an extra shot, just in case. The intention was, as I understand it from his explanation, that after he developed one sheet, if it didn't come out ideally (which it didn't), then he would have had a reserve shot which he could develop differently. I don't think exposure bracketing was in mind.

 

[Andrew O'Neill]

Imagine if he had stayed one minute longer at the stump before packing it in...

 

[takilmaboxer]

He tried to take a second shot but the sun disappeared behind a cloud! It's my understanding that he did intensification on the foreground portion of the negative.
Many years ago the Smith Santa Fe gallery had a show of that one image, on the anniversary of its shooting. It included a bunch of older prints, including some straight "work" prints. Based on those I'd say AA had to pull out every trick he knew to make a beautiful print. Today he could cheat-scan it and manipulate it in a computer. Not possible in his day.

 

[koraks]

It's my understanding that he did intensification on the foreground portion of the negative.

Generally when you intensify a negative, you go all in and do the entire thing. It's really hard (read: impossible) to partly intensify a negative by chemical means without getting very apparent and very ugly marks and unevenness. I do a *lot* of negative intensification for carbon transfer; it's a powerful technique and I can easily see how it might have helped make this supposedly thin negative more easily printable. There's of course no way to make up for unrecorded shadow detail, but it's a whole lot easier printing something under the enlarger if you're not working all the way at the highest paper grade you can get your hands on.