Opinions on AA.

[rdenney]

Ah, I see you've brought it back on topic. But what about my theory? Dome shaped film, dome shaped photograph?

It's called a fisheye lens. That provides a spherical projection on flat film. (Spherically curved film being a bit of a mechanical challenge.)

You can get a cylindrical projection using a swing-lens panoramic camera (here, the film is curved, but the lens is rectilinear).

Or, you can use rectilinear projection.

None is more "correct" than the other. Each has their application. Incidentally, all the lenses Adams used were rectilinear.

I have used full-frame fisheye lenses extensively, and I really enjoy how they keep round things round. But if you want something straight kept straight, it has to go through the center of the frame.

Here's the problem when trying to relate this to our spherical retinas, however. We perceive images after they go through post-processing. Even when I close an eye and lose stereoscopic vision (which, by the way, has been done in photography, but not by Adams), straight lines in the periphery of my field of vision still seem straight. The reason they do is that my brain automatically provides a rectilinear projection filter for those items that are rectilinear. But it also provides a spherical filter for those items that are spherical.

We can create tension in an image by making straight lines curved when we would normally perceive them as straight, or round objects distorted when we normally perceive them as round. That tension seems to me to have as much potential artistic validity as seeking to relieve that tension. But one reason I have used fisheye lenses is to prevent the stretched look in the corners that comes with rectilinear lenses, when the items in the corners have organic, non-rectilinear shapes. All of this is highly dependent on the subject, of course. A fisheye lens for a horizontal view of trees would create plenty of that what I would call visual dissonance (which might suit my artistic purposes, or not). But if you point the camera straight up, tall trees still look fine because their lines cross through the center and they therefore stay straight. And on and on.

I'll include one image, linked only because it is small format.

Mt. St. Helens, fisheye lens.

Note that it does not look like a fisheye image--all the logs that are straight point through the center of the frame. The barrel distortion actually works with the shape of the mountain.

I could have made many rectilinear images at this location that would have pleased me.

Rick "pretty sure there is no Grand Unified Theory in the topic of which projection relieves 'visual dissonance', whatever that is defined to be" Denney

[goamules]

I don't know if anyone after Ansel Adams shot great landscapes. But some people did before.

1865, Carleton Watkins

[SamReeves]

I don't know if anyone after Ansel Adams shot great landscapes. But some people did before.

1865, Carleton Watkins

Yup.

I think AJ Russell, O' Sullivan were there too before Ansel??

[Vaughn]

I don't know if anyone after Ansel Adams shot great landscapes. But some people did before.

My old photo instructor introduced me one time as " the Ansel Adams of Humboldt County". It sort of bugged me as I thought I was the Vaughn of Humboldt County. I was glad I had not seen any of AA's work until I had started to form my own way of seeing the landscape.

If any photographer/image influenced me during my pre-photo years, it was Carleton Watkins. I grew up with two of his mammoth plate images on the walls...one being this one:

[tgtaylor]

Just because a photographer visits a location and comes away with images taken with the same perspective/location of an earlier photographer doesn't mean that the later photographer was influenced by the earlier. For example I have made several images that I later found AA made the same images from the same location with the same perspective. Further, in the above images by Watkins and AA note the different photographic syntaxes employed. Both are valid.

Thomas

[paulr]

I don't know if anyone after Ansel Adams shot great landscapes. But some people did before.

Many did, before, after, and during.

If the OP is really asking why no one in the history of the universe was as great as Ansel, then I'd suggest he turn the question around so that it makes sense: ask himself why he happens to like this one artist so much? Because the question is ultimately about taste, and no one else can answer it for him.

We can offer our own tastes (which are, not surprisingly, different from his and from each other's) or a sense of the collected opinions of critics and historians (which likewise differ from his and from each other's).

On the subject of lenses being "imperfect," it would be more accurate to say that perception is imperfect, and that each form of perception (human, insect, photo-mechanical, paint-on-canvas, etc.) is imperfect in its own unique way. Each mediates the incoming data of the world, and does so differently.

To make a perceiving or recording system perfect, we would first have to define "perfect." I can promise this would open up an epistemological and phenomenological can of worms. Which is to say, people would not easily agree on the definition.

[Kevin Crisp]

Sometimes when you troll you can catch a lot of fish.

[E. von Hoegh]

Sometimes when you troll you can catch a lot of fish.

And occasionally a boot.

[Brian C. Miller]

Incidentally, all the lenses Adams used were rectilinear.

Actually, there's a photo in The Camera from a Pentax 6x7 35mm lens. Adams seemed to like the lens and its perspective. (The images are probably in the 97% of his unprinted/unpublished work. Makes me wonder what else is in there, as he also liked 35mm.)

Even when I close an eye and lose stereoscopic vision (which, by the way, has been done in photography, but not by Adams), straight lines in the periphery of my field of vision still seem straight.

I'm confused. It seems as though you are saying that Adams didn't close one eye in photography.

[rdenney]

I'm confused. It seems as though you are saying that Adams didn't close one eye in photography.

You didn't see that in the FilmAmerica bio? He talked extensively about closing an eye to avoid the distortion caused by stereoscopic vision, as part of his scientific formula for eliminating visual dissonance.

Okay, so I meant that photography has done the stereoscopic thing, but Adams didn't make any images with a stereo camera. Now, you'll point out an example where he did.

Rick "whose perception is imperfect" Denney