Learning from the past masters
Photography is burdened with many grand phrases and one of the most established is "visualisation" - an ability to imagine the final print before opening the camera's shutter. Pretentious? It is certainly a complex word to explain a simple idea, but for many of the masters of landscape photography visualisation is of the utmost importance. Their photography is not complete until a successful print is made, and a print is the vital element to achieving their vision.
Photography's annals contain a host of wise words and among them is Ansel Adams when he wrote: "I think of the negative as the 'score' and the print as a 'performance' of that score, which conveys the emotional and aesthetic ideas of the photographer at the time of making the exposure." If you use a digital camera, subsititute RAW file for negative and nothing else has changed in the decades that have passed since Adams first wrote about visualisation.
Adams evolved his Zone System to deal with exposure, which in his day was probably the most difficult technical issue in photography. Exposure with a digital camera is no longer a technical difficulty, but with an understanding of what a histogram represents and how the levels of brightness are distributed along its horizontal axis, it is still possible to break the exposure down into zones and strive to make prints with a full and rich range of tones in a similar way to Adams.
The big difference now in the age of the computer is that you no longer need a well-equipped wet darkroom, just an imaging software package and an inkjet printer. The dry darkroom's learning curve is less demanding too, with not as much trial and error and fewer years of experience are needed to produce a print that pleases you. Whether it matches the superb standard of the wet darkroom expert is another debate. But it has brought the joy of printing your own photographs to a much wider audience and that can only be for the good.
Despite the extensive equipment in the Ansel Adams darkroom, and his great understanding of the science behind it all, he still viewed his printing as a craft and the final product as art. Today our monitors need calibrating and a printer profile for our chosen paper has to be loaded, but once these are in place it is possible to have the same approach as Adams, where you as a photographer make the decisions that affect the outcome of the print rather than the equipment. Have I got the contrast right? Should I ease back on the saturation? Can I open up or close down the shadows more?
Photography's masters of the past still have a lot to teach us. So however complex a word it is, I also strive to use visualisation out on location as the first stage towards making a print.
Sometimes it is more difficult than others, but on a breathless February morning alongside Loch Kernsary in the North West Highlands of Scotland I could visualise the print straight away. As details were slowly revealed from the hour before dawn light, I pictured how a long exposure would emphasise the sense of calm, smoothing out the cloud structure and raising the contrast between the tranquil waters of the loch against the jagged outline of Beinn Airigh Charr in the distance.
Shooting East towards the rising sun would cast parts of the foreground into heavy shadow and deliver the deep black to my print that would accentuate the mere hint of pre-sunrise pink on the ribs of cloud. With so much of the sky reflected on the surface of the loch, the contrast range for the camera was not significant, but I wanted a long exposure and chose a three stop solid neutral density filter to create eight seconds. This sacrificed some overall sharpness but I gained a gentle silk-like quality to the delicate sky that would work well later on the surface of my matt Hahnemuehle Photo Rag paper.
Interestingly, in his later years Ansel Adams went back to many of his iconic photographs and began to make more expressive prints of them by intensifying the blacks and sacrificing to some degree the great tonal range he had initially achieved. But these later prints had even greater emotion to them and it increased the drama in his larger landscapes.
Adams was working at a time of great innovation in photography, just as we are today and he was never afraid to experiment with new equipment and the opportunities it offered. But the art of photography and the craft of printing were always the foundation of his work. "I am sure the next step will be the electronic image, and I hope I shall live to see it," he said. But he was also quick to add: "I trust the creative eye will continue to function, whatever technological innovations may develop."