Artists are blessed and cursed. We create from
visions within, yet cannot help but see those subtleties separating the good
from the excellent and the excellent from the genius. We apply this ‘eye’ to
our own work, whether music, painting or photography, and become our own
toughest critics when we see just how much we fall short of our sources of
inspiration. I look at the work of Joe McNally, Bryan Peterson, Glen
Johnson, John Shaw, Annie Leibovitz… Henri Cartier-Bresson, and work hard to
incorporate their genius into my style – ever aware just how much I fall
short such high standards. Of course, Ansel Adams belongs on this list as
well. His darkroom skill will likely never be bested, and the powerful
simplicity of his compositions is a hallmark of fine photography that
others, myself included, aspire to.
I was honored to win the Ansel Adams Award for Fine Photography my senior
year of high school – signed by Virginia Adams herself! I spent many of
those days hiking around with a 4x5 view camera, plates, and the largest
tripod I’ve ever carried, trying my best to imitate one of my heroes. The
better I became, the more I was able to appreciate just how large the gap
was between what I could produce and what Ansel did.
Ansel was very methodological in his approach. He would visualize an image
from start to finish even before the first meter reading. He’d mark on his
plates exactly how he planned to develop the film back in the darkroom. Of
course, Ansel had his happy accidents -
Moonrise Over Hernandez, his most celebrated image, chief among them.
This image was also one of those happy accidents. I was meandering about
with my wife and sister, looked over my shoulder, saw this scene, and
instantly knew it would be the shot of the day. The composition was a
no-brainer… the horse in the foreground with the triangular s-shaped fence
leading the eye to the rest of the horses and the rancher’s house was
practically gift-wrapped. I’d like to think even Ansel himself would
approve.
The sky was mostly cloudy, creating a relatively low dynamic range (for a
snowy scene anyway) and
affording me an exposure that captured the detail in the clouds and snow.
Still, it’s easy to see where I am not Ansel…. he would have kept detail in
the shadow areas of the horses and the brightest whites in the fence line.
He would have known they would be important to the final image, and would
have exposed and developed accordingly. Me, I just wasn’t paying enough
attention to recognize it at a time when I could have done something about
it. I still love this image, flaws and all. Absent my studies of Ansel
Adams, I might not have noticed these flaws, maybe enjoying the image more –
but then I wouldn’t be as good of a photographer.
Yes… a blessing and a curse. The trick in all this is not to become
discouraged as your awareness of what separates good, excellent and genius
increases. Rather, allow that awareness to inspire you on to higher levels.
Take the curse for what it is and improve your skills. Just never forget to
enjoy the blessing along the path to becoming a better artist.
Technical Details: 1/350th sec at f/11 - 18-200mm @ 22mm -
in-camera conversion to sepia B/W - JPEG ISO 200
I broke MANY of my usual technical ‘ten-commandments’ when I took this
picture. I never expected the final result to turn out this well. I shot,
in camera, straight to black and white and straight to JPEG – two
conversions I almost always do in the pixelroom. I had the Nikon Active-D
lighting feature turned on, and the camera did a great job preserving detail
considering the sun is in the upper-left corner of the frame. However, had
I been shooting RAW, I suspect that I would have been able to save more
detail in the shadow portion of the horses. I wasn’t using a tripod, as
this was a walk about session, but with the light level as high as it was, I
was able to utilize a fast shutter-speed to mitigate most of the
hand-holding ‘jiggles’. I set the camera’s aperture to f/11, the highest I
could go with the specific lens/camera combination in use without
introducing diffraction-related softness, adjusting the shutter speed until
the meter read one stop overexposed, and just ripped away.
