Winter Sunrise from Lone Pine - Ansel Adams

Preamble - I’ve written so many good articles over the year on this blog, that I sometimes find that something I wish to cover, has already been covered a while ago. So today, I am re-posting this article from June 29 2018.

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As part of my Digital Darkroom and Printing workshops, I enjoy enormously showing the beautiful Ansel Adams photograph 'winter sunrise from lone pine'  to my class. It's a great illustration of the 'creative edit' and well worth discussing in detail. 

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'Winter sunrise from lone pine', the achingly beautiful image with wondrous print interpretation by Ansel Adams
Image © Ansel Adams

Before I dissect the image, I am curious if you can actually see the edits that Ansel has done to the image? Are they very apparent to you? I only ask for the sake of wondering how much skill each of us possess at deconstructing an image, or whether each of us simply just 'buy it' when we look at the photograph? My own thoughts on this are that great images tend to cast a spell on us and we are too enwrapped in enjoying the spell we're under to think more about how the image is constructed. As part of our 'learning to become better photographers', I think it is natural to be able to 'enjoy an image' as well as dissect it.

I think great photographs cast a spell on us with their imagery, and whether they are 'real' or not is irrelevant. 

Ansel Adams was a great illusionist. When I look at his images I believe them, even though I know a lot of work went into the manipulation of the negative in the dark room. To me - this  is what photography is all about..

Let's break down Ansel's image into it's core parts:

Ansel's image can be broken down into four summary edits (I'm sure there were more, but these are the ones I see he has attempted), which I've illustrated above in different colours:

Image Analysis

Blue area:
The Sky. Which seems to have been printed with as little contrast as possible to try to reduce the brilliance / emphasis of the cloud at the far right of the picture. If the clouds had more contrast then they would be competing with the white mountain for attention, and ultimately, stealing a little bit of the mountain's main attention grabbing ability.

Orange area:
The snowy mountains and dark hill. This is the high-contrast area of the scene and the area that is the 'initial pull'. Although this area takes us into the picture, it is not the last thing our eye settles on.

Green area:
Ground area, a necessary part of the picture, because it gives us context, even though it adds little interest to the image.

Red area:
Forest & horse. The part of the image I consider the 'easter egg' - that special bit of surprise that you see after you've looked at the high contrast mountains.
 

 

Making the print

Let us now consider the image from how Ansel may have chosen to print / edit it. If I were to make a guess on what choices Ansel made, I would assume the following:

Blue area

He would have reduced the contrast here as much as he possibly could. His aim would have been to suppress that white cloud on the far right hand side of the image, so that it does not compete with the brilliance of the jagged mountain range. He wants the white mountain to be as bright as possible, and the only way to do that is to suppress bright tones elsewhere in the image. The key is - if you want something to be brighter, darken everything else around it. So I believe that Ansel has darkened the sky for two reasons: it makes the mountain appear brighter, and it also reduces the distraction of the cloud.

Orange area

This is the main part of the image: what we are really coming to look at. It is perhaps the most 'closest to reality part of the image',. The white snowy mountain had a lot of directional hard light on it and the shadows are sharply defined here. If the image had been made on a soft-light day, even by adding a lot of contrast the shadows would have still been very diffused. So I think it's fair to say it was a high-contrast day, and Ansel has let the mountains be what it is: a high contrast subject.

With regards to the dark curvy hill, my guess is that it is impossible to put in a sudden separation in tone if there was none in the negative. So I would assume that the hill was dark, or underexposed, but by burning further in, Ansel has allowed the dark nature of the hill to become more prominent.

Green area

The contrasts in this part of the frame need to be kept under control so that the eye goes straight to the mountains and secondly to the horse. So Ansel has had to finely balance the ground so that it's not too dark or or light: not too dominant in either way: it needs to be wallpaper to a degree so the eye can scan over it and not get stuck in there.

Red Area

This is the 'easter egg' of the picture. It's the 'surprise element' that you only see after you have been drawn to the mountains upon first viewing. 

For this part of the print, Ansel has chosen to dodge the surrounding area around the horse, to give the illusion that the sun is highlighting the are where the horse is. To do this he has deliberately avoided exposing the paper at this region to lighten up the forest, but he has also had to make sure that the horse stays very dark even though he is dodging. I think he would have altered contrasts here to accomplish that.

In summary

This image is really about two subjects. The primary one is the mountain range of extreme highlights and dark tones contrasting with each other. The secondary subject is the horse. It's what you see after you eye has moved away from the mountain range.

To accomplish this, Ansel has darkened down a good proportion of the image and left two subjects to be as bright as naturally possible: the white mountains and the area around the horse. He has masterfully orchestrated our eye to initially be attracted to the brightness and contrasts of the white mountain and dark hill, and then to move straight to the horse in the lower part of the frame. Everything else has either been darkened or had contrast removed so the viewers eye does not get pulled away from the main areas of interest in the picture.

It is a masterpiece of editing skill and it always amazes me when I look at it.

Editing is indeed a skill. It is a life-long endeavour to search for the underlying meaning in our work and to bring it out. Sometimes to emphasise certain areas of the picture, we need to reduce surrounding areas by a large degree to let the areas we are interested in stand out. This image is a great example of that.

Percy's Perspective

The past few months since Michael Kenna published his exhibition dates, which featured a photo called ‘Percy’s Perspective’, I’ve been receiving many emails a day about it asking if the name of the image had any relation to myself.

Then yesterday, a piece appeared in the Guardian newspaper (Uk major tabloid), and Michael name checked me towards the end of the article. Again, I received a load of emails from folks telling me that Michael had name checked me.

I think it would be nice to give some context to this, and how it all came about.

If you are a regular reader of my blog, you will know that I have been a fan of Michael Kenna’s work since the late 80’s. He is one of my influences for sure. You just need to look at my work to see it. I have no problem citing my influences and I owe Michael Kenna a terrific debt to showing me the way forward. I know my style of photography wouldn’t be what it is without him.

So consider that back in 2009, when I was just starting out as a photographer, I emailed him to ask for some advice regarding gallery representation, and I got a reply. I specifically remember Michael saying “your work is very beautiful, congratulations” (I should perhaps point out that from my dealings with Michael, he is extremely polite and above all else, highly encouraging).

Since that email in 2009, I’ve met him around three times, and on all occasions it was a lot of fun. The last time being in 2020 when he invited me to a Karaoke party he was having in Tokyo (he knew I was in town - and knew I had never done Karaoke before). I must admit that I was apprehensive about doing karaoke, but also knew I would regret not going.

The Karaoke was an excellent night. Despite my terrible singing, and not practicing as I had been instructed to do by Michael (he is a well practiced Karaoke singer and had prepared a Bruce Springsteen number which he did very well). His agent also did an amazing version of Bowie’s ‘China Girl’.

This brings me to the fact that I was in Japan because I run a yearly winter Hokkaido tour. This is where the connection to the photograph above comes in. I only went to Hokkaido because I was drawn there by Michael’s beautiful work. I share his guide. The tree above is one such location that Tsuyoshi found while I was with him back in December 2015.

I can’t really say it’s my find. Tsuyoshi found it for me. But I do love the location. It is one of my most favourite places to visit in Hokkaido.

Had someone told me back in the late 80’s, that one day I would not only spend some time with Michael, but that I would also have an image named after me, I would not have believed it possible. But it did happen, and photography seems to surprise me every now and then with where it takes me.

I’d like to finish by also saying that Michael’s gesture of naming the image after me is quite playful, but I think he also likes to acknowledge any connections that he makes along his photographic journey. He’s a nice fellow. The world is an exciting place for him, and you sense it when you’re around him.

Perhaps the biggest give away from this is to practice your Karaoke. As you never really know when you’ll need it.

Michaels new retrospective book is available this November and from what I can see of it so far, there are written descriptions of the making of each image within the book.

A private endeavour

This video mirrors my own views very much about why we create photographs, and what is most important in tending our creative lives.

I have for many years now, thought that photography is actually a very private endeavour. We do it because we cannot not do it. We do it because it enriches our experience of life in some way that, if we didn’t do it any more, we would feel something was missing.

And yet it is very easy to get a bit lost. To start to believe that we are making images to build an audience, or to show others what we saw. I never first picked up a camera for any of these reasons, and neither did you.

I think it is always worth trying to reconnect to your very first impulses for buying a camera and making images. In this video, we see that Vivian Maier made images for one sole reason: because it provided something in her life that she would have been lost without.

I really do think that photography is a private endeavour. I know that might seem like a huge contradiction from someone who foolishly listened to his friends when they said ‘you should go professional’. If I were not running a photography business, I would be perfectly happy now, not having a website and not sharing my work. I’ve been though 14 years of having people tell me all sorts of nice/weird/wonderful things about my imagery. As variable as the feedback has been, there has always been one constant: and that is me. I make images for myself, and you do to, and to believe otherwise is a deception.

If you go back and think about why you picked up a camera in the first place, then you will understand what I mean.

Driving onto the Langjökull glacier

My guide in Iceland always takes me on the science route :-)

I had a nice time in Iceland last week. Here I am on the langjökull glacier.

Emotional 'reading' vs Cerebral 'reading'

Dave Hinton, one of my tour participants this September, sent me this photograph. Apparently the two people in it (click to enlarge) are one of the other tour participants and myself.

I really enjoyed looking at this photo as it helps convey the scale of the Icelandic interior. You won’t bump into other photographic tourists or tours here for sure, and even if you did, it would be rather silly if you were all trying to photograph the same thing. There’s more than enough to go round.

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Myself and a participant on my recent Iceland interior tour
Image © Dave Hinton, tour participant September 2023.

Scale is one of the most difficult things to convey in a photograph. I remember on a workshop in Skye, one of my participants asked me if we would be photographing ‘the island’ rather than compositions of parts of a landscape. I asked him what he meant, and he told me his wife had asked him ‘yes this is all very good darling, but what does the island look like?’.

It was a valid point.

How do we convey the sense of a vast place, or an entire island in just one photo? Can it be done? (I think if it can, it would be very hard). Vista shots rarely work because although everything is in the shot, all of it is too far away, and there is no one single focal point of the shot. Everything is there, yet everything is lost. Similarly with arial shots of an entire island. You might get a sense of the shape of the island, but you can’t really make out specific aspects of it.

I sometimes think we wish to be all-seeing, all-present. We wish to capture ‘all’, and convey ‘all’. Yet, this is too much to attempt, and if we did accomplish it, the viewer would be unable to process it. I think that is why generally speaking, successful landscape are often a subset of a place.

I think trying to convey scale in photographs only works on a cerebral level and not on an emotional level at first glance. The picture above is beautiful for the general composition of the peaked hill side and the horizontal tones flowing through the panorama. The small figures in the centre are what I would call ‘easter eggs’ - features you see secondly. Therefore, this photo is first accepted and taken on an emotional level by enjoying the sweeping tones and atmosphere of the landscape. It is then taken on a cerebral level when we notice the two figures. That is when we context switch from emotional to cerebral. We are now analysing the size of the figures against the backdrop of the vast Icelandic landscape, and we cannot help but compute spacial distances and figure out that this landscape is huge.

But there always has to be that context switch from emotional to cerebral. We cannot enjoy scale and beauty at the same time. Beauty is emotional. Scale is a cerebral effort.

I believe that ‘reading’ (looking at) photographs sometimes requires a mixture of the two : sometimes we are emotionally reading while other times we are cerebral in our reading. We move between the two as we continue to look at a photograph that has beauty and scale in it.

I suppose what I’m driving at, is that emotional and cerebral viewing are independent of each other, and never shall they meet. When we have to shift gears to look at the picture another way, any emotional spell that was cast upon us is now in danger of being thrown aside, or at the very least interrupted, in the pursuit of understanding scale.

More a rhetorical question than anything, I wonder which is best? A photograph that keeps us rooted in the emotional at all times, or one that allows us to find a second underlying theme, such as scale?

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Many thanks to Dave Hinton for allowing me to reproduce his thought provoking image on this blog.

The Photographer's Ephemeris - a photo walk through

Preamble: I’ve chosen to switch comments on for this video. I would like to hear if you enjoyed the editing side of the presentation - which begins about half way through.

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I’ve known Stephen Trainor, the developer of TPE (The Photographer’s Ephemeris) for more than a decade. We wrote an e-Book together which kept on selling and selling for a decade.

The Photographer’s Ephemeris has come a long way, and now has fantastic 3D maps and 3D sun and moon graphics.

Stephen asked me recently to explain how I came about my photo ‘Laguna Blanca Nocturne’.

And so here is a 10 minute video explaining my motivations behind the scene above.

I always check my locations before going as to where the sun will be. I had not anticipated getting such good light at this lagoon, as we often arrive in Bolivia (and close by this lagoon) around 11am at the start of my tour here.

This last May I felt blessed. The light was overcast, and soft. Ideal for midday shooting….. Glad I checked out TPE before I went….

Please do leave a comment if you enjoyed the edit session.

Going lower gives depth

One of my participants recently made the assumption that this image was made with a telephoto because of the deliberate out of focus foreground, and also perhaps because the Cono de Arita is a hard subject to judge in terms of distance.

Well the image was made with a standard lens, in my case that means an 80mm lens. Although it has a similar field of view as a 40mm lens on a 35mm camera has, it still has the compression and depth of field properties of an 80mm lens. So there is that to consider. But the main reason why the foreground is so out of focus is because the camera was lying on the surface of the ground.

Tripod height is critical in composing. I so often see participants locked at the same height for the duration of a workshop, and for me, I always like to experiment to see how the image may change if I put the camera much lower, or even much higher than I am.

Some locations are so vast, that even when I have moved, the scene changes little. Bolivia and the Puna of Argentina are such places. If I cannot find anything of note to use in the foreground then I will experiment with focal lengths to try to give different perspective.

But I often think that we ignore placing the camera below our own eye level at times, and in particular putting the camera right down on the ground really forces the foreground to be extremely blurred. I like this effect a lot, and it does help impart a sense of dynamics and compression to the shot.

Editing brings focus

My dear friend Sven Kohnke is a talented photographer. He has come on a few workshops with me now and is always a welcome voice during my editing sessions.

I re-joined Instagram a few weeks ago (I don’t really know why I did so - perhaps I was missing being part of community? I don’t know). But there is a mini community of souls on there that I have met on my workshops. Many have become friends, as is normal when you run trips and spend a good week with a group of people.

Whilst on Instagram, Sven’s portfolio popped up and I saw this image:

The one thing I have learned about my own work, is that even when I think I can’t go any further with an edit, there is always more to do. I don’t look at editing as ‘fixing things’, but more as ‘interpretation’ and it is one of the ways in which we can impart a sense of our own vision and style onto our photographs.

So I set about playing with Sven’s image and this is where I ended up:

I felt that this version brought more focus to the work, while also lending a more graphic aspect to it as well.

There are about five or six main areas where I altered the tones in the image, but I wonder how many of them you can spot?

The ones that I would guess where you can’t see where I’ve change the image are, in my view these three main areas:

1. The base of the building is darker, and the top of the reflection where it joins the building is darker also. This is deliberate, and although may seem counter-intuitive, I have allowed the building and reflection to be more ‘separate’ from each other.

2. The building has a vignette around it. It is brighter in towards the middle. This has been done as a long tall oval shape.

3. The same treatment for the building has been applied to the reflection: it too has a vignette - but i only needed to darken the top of the reflection to achieve the ‘oval’ shape.

In my view, every alteration should have a clear intention. Mostly, I find myself doing these last three edits to help impart a sense of 3-dimensionality to the image. Gradients are one of the ways we can tell the viewer about distance and shape.

The more obvious edits are the darkening of the surrounding buildings to remove any distractions and allow the eye to settle on the building and it’s reflection.

One last thing, I moved the building up in the frame. I felt it was sinking (it is - it’s in Venice!), but by placing it above centre, it now feels more upright, more forward, and also it feels taller as well. The height of the building has space now to stretch down and continue through the reflection and have sufficient space around it and its reflection. Prior to this, I felt the reflection was almost hitting the bottom of the frame and in a way, was a little bit like an after-thought. The picture now feels as though it is about the building and its reflection.

“when an edit is executed well,
it should become instantly integrated, as though it was always part of the original capture”

Had I not chosen to show you the before / after versions, I think most folks would not know what had been done to the picture. They would just ‘believe it’. This is the ultimate goal in any editing we do. To cast a spell upon the viewer.

Sven is incredibly good humoured to allow me to edit his beautiful image. He is also gracious enough to put up with my requesting that I write about this edit on my blog.

If I have any single message to impart, is that editing is one of the ways we can help bring our work to another level. If we edit well, we can often bring out the parts of the scene that we know are elegant and beautiful, while at the same time quieten the areas that are less so. When we do this well, editing brings clarity of purpose to the composition. It achieves an enhanced creative focus to the work at hand.

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Postamble: You can view Sven’s instagram here.

I would like to thank Sven very much for being such a good sport, and allowing me to reproduce this edit here on my blog.

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Before and after. Click to see larger.

It's time to start living again

Since returning back to my workshops and tours around eighteen months ago (first trip was to Iceland as they opened before anyone else did), I have noticed that the world is not back to normal yet.

This has been confirmed to me by being in touch with so many pre-covid workshop friends. Most are telling me they haven’t been anywhere yet. But not only that, for most, the camera has been sitting in their camera bag for three years now. This was confirmed to me this week when a good friend told me he was concerned about using his camera this October, because he has become so rusty.

I feel like we all went to sleep, and some of us are taking a long time to wake up from the sleep. I know in my own case it has taken me a good many months to get myself back up to speed with working on my trips. I still sort of feel that my body isn’t quite 100%. I have since come to the conclusion that shutting down a society for even just a short while, has long lasting effects on people’s lives. Emotional, spiritual, energy wise, and of course financial.

But for me, it’s the emotional and spiritual side that I’m noticing the most. Folks aspirations don’t seem to be there so much and many have settled into a confined life centred around home and working from home.

I would say: if you haven’t been out on a trip somewhere yet with your camera, then perhaps it’s time to think about even dusting it off and going somewhere in a weekend or two. Plan some time, plan a private trip.

Momentum has been lost, and I know all too well that when I lose momentum creatively speaking, it can take a bit of effort to get the ball rolling again.

If you still haven’t been anywhere yet, or taken your camera out of its bag in three years, then I’m hoping that maybe this post today will give you the impetus to change that. There are beautiful images waiting for all of us us out there, and we won’t get the last three years back.

Talent

When I think about what it is that we are all striving for, it is to create beautiful work. But beautiful work isn’t just ‘pretty’. Beautiful work is so, often because of a uniqueness. Either that uniqueness is something to do with the way the photographer saw the composition, or it could be in how they choose to edit it.

A very old image. But I like to think that there were already clues and signs to what I do best.

In my view, we all need to work on ourselves, and the first thing we need to realise is that we tend to do things that others don’t do. Instead of hoping our work will be up to scratch like the work of a photographer we admire, we should really take delight in the fact we don’t do what they do. You do ‘you’. And it just so happens that you do ‘you’ very well.

The problem is in actually knowing which part of the work you create is ‘you’, and being able to understand which parts are your influences as well.

I really do feel that we all have a uniqueness, but it is often masked or smothered by our attempts to be more like someone else, or to aspire to the same kind of look as someone else’s work.

You, my dear reader, have a unique voice. You excel at being you. If you look at it another way - nobody will be able to do ‘you’ better than you do. And with this in mind, since everyone else is taken anyway, why not spend the time trying to find out more about you?