redbandit - AA wasn't even remotely up to speed with the "latest" and most sophisticated printing techniques. Heck, if you want Fauxtopshoppish tomfoolery, three little girls concocted an infamous composite print before the turn of the Century which fooled even Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes detective series. Color press printing was around while AA was still in diapers, which was far more technically involved than anything he ever did. And as for creative liberty, look at Outerbridge, or the Surrealist movement before him, and how they printed. And then there's Stiegliz's mastery of multiple media, including gravure, all of it way more involved than anything Adams found personally necessary.
Why does everything on this forum need to gravitate towards ignorant extremes, one direction or another. AA was not the apogee of technique; but he did learn to master his own bookends of variables to obtain the best representation of his own sight and feeling with respect to what he saw. Relatively few of his Zonie clones did. It goes beyond mere technique; but technique was a critical tool in eloquently conveying it.
AA did post-blacken the sky in his famous Hernandez Moonrise shot not only for sake of a little more drama, but to disguise the many water-bath development streaks and blotches in the sky, which are more evident in those early prints prior to him selenium intensifying the negative. If there are now more houses and fences around Hernandez than in the original photo it just might be due to 70 years of difference in time, just like how any rural town is likely to enlarge. Ever think about that?
As far as his erasure of LP on the hillside above Lone Pine in his famous sunrise shot there, it involved a literal eraser on the negative to reduce the density, and was for esthetic reasons. But the ruse is still evident if you look closely at the prints, and even in quality book reproductions. But that was hardly anything Photoshoppy. Even P.H. Emerson, who damned dodging and burning ("sundowning") as cheating, sometimes did the same kind of thing, removing annoying bright spots. But that's about the most egregious thing AA ever did.
You want deceptive comps in famous documentary pictures? - study W. Eugene Smith instead. Or in famous landscapes? - look up how Vittoria sella dubbed in climbers on the Baltoro Glacier in Pakistan using a negative of climbers taken in the Alps, and did it so well and seamlessly, that nobody discovered that until the original Baltoro neg was found in recent years and studied up close. And all through the blue-sensitive film days of the 19th C, photographers would make separate exposures of clouds to dub into otherwise blank skies. I don't think Adams ever did that kind of thing. He would enhance clouds via contrast filters and pan film, just like nearly everyone now does.
I probably know that same mountain light better than anyone else on this forum, and understand how Adam's use of it, and of cloud formations, was never faked, in relation to my own impressions. If you had grown up there, and taken hundreds of backpack trips up in the high country with large format film gear yourself, just like I have, redbandit, I doubt you'd be making these silly allegations. Besides, there were often people with him, who could attest to his visual honesty, including the Moonrise shot at Hernandez. I've got my own spectacular moonrise from a different Western desert setting. So do many others. Get outside a little; it actually happens.
