Do you have any technical information on this image -- Plate #7 in Ansel Adams' Sierra Nevada? Shot with "normal" focal length?
Do you have any technical information on this image -- Plate #7 in Ansel Adams' Sierra Nevada? Shot with "normal" focal length?
Wilhelm (Sarasota)
If it's the early "Parmelian print" version that was maybe half plate, the angle of perspective was only slightly long, so perhaps 12 inch or so, roughly equivalent
to what a 210 would give you on 4x5. It doesn't take all that much to make Banner Peak look big from that angle. It rises almost four thousand feet higher than the
lake right on the other side of it, though this is a relatively large lake by Sierra standards. Given modern gear, for the same perspective I would (and have) used a
210 with 4x5 film, or 450 on 8x10.
When I saw this thread back in August I thought that somewhere I had some information on this but didn't know where. Yesterday I was leafing through my copy of Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada , Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1948, photographs by Ansel Adams and selections from the works of John Muir, Charlotte E. Mauk, ed. This photograph is plate 60. Quoting the technical notes: " 6 1/2" X 8 1/2" plate camera, 9" Goerz Dagor lens, Wratten Panchromatic Plate, K2 filter, Negative developed in Pyro". With this further comment: "This is one of my early Sierra photographs (1927). The delicate gradations in the sunset clouds were retained by the Pyro developer".
David
Thanks, David. (What a memory you've got!)
Wilhelm (Sarasota)
Bookmarks