Reddit Reddit reviews The Negative (Ansel Adams Photography)

We found 21 Reddit comments about The Negative (Ansel Adams Photography). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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21 Reddit comments about The Negative (Ansel Adams Photography):

u/rideThe · 30 pointsr/photography

> zone system

Do you shoot film? Because I don't see the point of the zone system with digital. I can imagine that in the process of learning about it it has helped you reframe the way you thought about exposure somehow. But the practical, real-life application of the zone system to shooting digital? I don't see it.

Ansel Adams pretty much wrote the book on optimizing your exposure with film in The Negative, but the optimal exposure with digital is much simpler, it's ETTR.

> realizing that 90% of the so called wisdom about shooting people at "portrait focal lengths" is garbage

On that point I came to realize that people just use the word "portrait" when what they actually mean is "headshot". A portrait can be so much more than a headshot, and as such there really is no such thing as a "portrait lens", any lens could be used for a portrait. My [own] favorite portraits are shot with a 50mm (on full frame).

A headshot lens, however...

> you don't have to point the softbox at the subject

That's called feathering the light. I think I first woke up to this concept watching a Joey L tutorial...

u/mjm8218 · 11 pointsr/photography

The Camera, The Nevative and The Print by Ansel Adams. The Camera in particular is still relevant today; and these three books are essential reads for anyone who still shoots film.

u/thingpaint · 9 pointsr/AnalogCommunity

Ansel Adam's books are amazing. The Camera and The Negative are really good. The Print is also good but not really relevant to a hybrid work flow. Still neat reading though.

u/bbmm · 6 pointsr/photography

You might want to ask in /r/analog or another film-friendly place about stand development. There, the idea is to exhaust the dilute developer touching the film (no or very little agitation) so film gets as much development as it needs. If a frame is overexposed it'll just exhaust the developer soon and the development will stop while its underexposed neighbor will slowly develop. This gets you some latitude. Now, of course the developer doesn't know frame boundaries, and the mechanism works just like that within a single frame, doing things to contrast, even giving you things like sharpening halos. Please don't take my word for it, though, google for it and ask around.

For frame-specific regular development you'll need to be shooting single frames, as you've discovered. This is not as nutty as it sounds as it was what early photographers were doing and large format photographers still do. If you're curious, Ansel Adams wrote a three volume series, two of which dealt with just how to make exposure and development fit the scene on a per-frame/per-print basis (here's v2. The Negative).

u/jrshaul · 6 pointsr/photography

How familiar are you with modern photography, exactly? Have you ever enlarged prints in a darkroom or looked at the various wet-lab digital print options? Have you ever tried processing giant sheets of color film?

4X5 film has mostly been rendered obsolete by tilt-shift lenses on medium format digital, and even your D3200 will outperform it if you're stitching a panorama. 8x10 color is very tricky to process due to thermal considerations and sheer size, and at $5+ a sheet with the cost of home development, that $5,000 MF body starts looking good real fast.

And that's if you don't need flash. The bigger the body, the more power you need. My 300Ws battery strobe the size of a jam jar would require a 4000Ws pack-and-head system - and a generator.

>I want a store front with a big gallery in an area where the rich and middle class all hang out at. I want to show my work and create a small section for a guest artist to show off his or her work.

You want something that doesn't exist. Malls are dead, art purchases are down, and no photographer can afford the rent on a decent gallery. Maybe you'll sell a few big prints at someone else's gallery...at 50% commission, until they, too, shut their doors.

You wanna make bank? Get work for H&M.

> I believe in doing things right at the scene instead of repairing bad photos.

I know someone who got her start in photography working for Ansel Adams.

Ansel Adams spent a lot of time in the darkroom. In fact, he wrote the book on it.

And he spent most of his time on tedious commercial crap.

u/seriouslyawesome · 6 pointsr/photography

If you really want to know about HDR, go pick up copies of Ansel Adams' The Camera, The Negative, and The Print. I'm not even a big Ansel Adams fan, but the dude understood HDR before it was 'cool.'

And I agree with goose_of_trees: The HDR technique here is mostly used to take boring shots and make them look terrible. Good HDR should be invisible to the viewer - they should be captivated by the content first, and if extending the dynamic range of the image will enhance that, then it is appropriate to do so.

u/zstone · 3 pointsr/AskPhotography

Everybody knows it but it still needs to be said: shoot, shoot, shoot.

Willief is spot-on in my opinion. An exercise I think you might find helpful is to give yourself assignments. Just like practice, or buying books about photography, it only works if you stick to it. You have landscapes, and your still-life work is coming along well too. I would say that in addition to portraiture (both studio and candid), you should consider other genres that 'put you out there' more, that are less under your control than your current work. Street photography instantly springs to mind - you don't have to live in NYC or LA to have amazing opportunities at street photography. If you're in a more rural locale, consider work like Frank's "The Americans," or Bruce Davidson, or even combine what you can do with what you want to learn, something like R.E. Meatyard.

When you want to push your landscapes farther, I would send you in two directions: Ansel Adams for technical mastery (if you haven't, read the holy trilogy, Camera, Negative, Print), and Minor White for artistry/composition.

You're already doing great work, keep on keeping on, never settle.

u/keithb · 3 pointsr/analog

All exposure meters are built to work with reference to a certain reflectivity—specifically 18%, hence the grey cards of that tone—with the idea that with the indicated exposure and “normal” processing of film and “normal” printing in the darkroom the area of the print corresponding to the metered area will have the same reflectivity.

For an averaging meter it's the whole scene that's measured. With a spot meter it is a small area. So, spot meter off a shadow and, without adjustment, it will come up at 18% grey and the highlights will be blown. Spot meter off a bright area and the shadows will block up.

Meter off a shadow area and then reduce the exposure by a few stops, and we can get the shadow to not quite block up and still show detail. The full explanation of this is in Ansel Adam's book The Negative, and the technique is known as the Zone System.

u/edwa6040 · 3 pointsr/analog

The Ansel Adams series

Camera

Negative

Print

Learn how to use the camera at your own pace then learn about processing at your own pace. And finally printing if you want to do that at your own pace.

u/av1cenna · 2 pointsr/analog

My favorite educational book on photography is probably "The Art of Photography: An Approach to Personal Expression" by Bruce Barnbaum.

My favorite book on portraiture is "50 Portraits" by Gregory Heisler and for landscapes it's "Treasured Lands" by Q.T. Luong.

All of these have a big focus on film photography.

Another good set is Ansel Adams trilogy, The Camera, The Negative and The Print, which you can get used on Amazon for about $20 for all three books. However, they focus primarily on large format cameras, black and white negatives, and darkroom printing, so unless you're doing specifically that, I'd go with The Art of Photography above.

u/JZA_Tog · 2 pointsr/analog

All of the comments sound like good advice to me too. Standardising the processing is a good plan also - to my mind there are far more interesting parameters to experiment with. I'd also endorse looking at Adams' zone system - The Negative, it's mainly intended for sheet film, but he's an easy read and it gives a really thorough grounding in what can be achieved with film - I'll bet it improves your digital work too

u/encinitaschaco · 2 pointsr/photography

I get asked a variant of this, which is "are those the real colors?" I wrote an article to answer the question.

I'm reading a fascinating book now called Coloring the Universe: An Insider's Look at Making Spectacular Images of Space about the creation of those incredible images from space. I never realized that the photos started out as b&w images with no color at all. It's a great explanation as well of the limitations of eye sight. And there are the two books Ansel Adams wrote on post processing, The Print and The Negative.

If we're talking about photography as an art form, then this question is equivalent to asking a painter if they mix their paint, or only use them as they come out of the tube. It's a stupid question (not that I would tell a viewer that), but it comes from the newness of this medium as an art form and to some extent, the insecurity of photographers themselves.

u/[deleted] · 2 pointsr/photocritique

A good start! I'd say that you're pushing the blacks up too much, and not exposing for your target's face.
Switch from full-frame metering to spot (or center-weighted if you're worried that you're going to blow out the background). After you're in spot metering mode, zero out your light meter on the shadow side of their face. In most lighting situations, that's kind of what you want-- 18% gray in facial shadows.
Pick up The Camera and The Negative . The combination of his discussion on the finer aspects of photography, his philosophy, and the practical aspects of the Zone System help more than any other resource out there.

u/civildisobedient · 2 pointsr/Design

> What makes pantone any different than going to a hardware store and getting their paint swatches for free?

Because Pantone is guaranteeing not just the color ink is right, they're guaranteeing that the print is right. Those are two totally separate things.

There are about a million different ways to fuck up a physical print. Open up some art books and compare the pictures of the same piece of art. You'll see all kinds of range of colors on the page. Consider, one of the reasons art collectors place a premium on lithographs is because one of the things you pay for when you get a lithograph or other "pure ink" facsimile of a piece of artwork is the guarantee that it will continue to actually look like the same thing according to the people that are the ones that define what "it" actually is.

u/windsostrange · 2 pointsr/photography
u/jeffk42 · 2 pointsr/analog

Someone else might be able to point you toward something online, but for me, The Negative and The Print are pretty essential. Understanding the Zone System opens up a new world of possibilities when you're ready to progress past blindly following manufacturer recommendations for developing. :)

u/microphylum · 2 pointsr/analog

There's basically a whole chapter devoted to this in the classic Ansel Adams book, The Negative.

Basically you take the meter reading and add a few stops. But I don't live in a place with snow either, so my personal experience isn't the best.

u/xnedski · 1 pointr/analog

Here's a stab at answering this one.

In the context of b/w negative film density refers to the darkness of the dark areas, which will be highlights in the print. Increasing exposure increases density, as does increasing development. Each film/developer combination can produce a maximum density and has a minimum density (film base + fog caused by developer).

At the same exposure a high speed film will build more density than a low speed film.

Adding development time will increase density in highlight areas (and effective film speed) but will also have undesirable effects (increased contrast and grain, for example).

For a given scene, a film will have an optimal combination of exposure and development time that will accurately reproduce it the way the photographer intended. Fine-tuning the relationship between exposure, development, negative density and the final print is the whole point of the Zone System. For more information see The Negative by Ansel Adams (especially chapter 10) or The Zone VI Workshop by Fred Picker.

u/BrennanOB · 1 pointr/photography

I would recommend ["The Print"] (http://www.amazon.com/New-Photo-Negative-Ansel-Photography/dp/0821221868) by Ansel Adams. A techincally deep but easy to read book covering the zone system and how to capture different forms of light.

For thinking about photography Susan Sontag's ["On Photography"] (http://www.amazon.com/Photography-Susan-Sontag/dp/0312420099/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1341440297&sr=1-1&keywords=sontag+photography) a great book on the meaning of photography.

Both are somewhat dated, but are the basis upon much has been written since. They are the touchstones.

u/CaptainTrips · 1 pointr/pics

Ansel Adams is the original HDR. Seriously. He has an entire book dedicated to the art of bringing out the desired, pre-visualized dynamic range of a print, via in-camera and darkroom techniques.

Of course, his images don't look like ass.

u/pl213 · 0 pointsr/photography

The Print, The Negative, and The Camera by Ansel Adams.