Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2008/12/21
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Alan Magayne-Roshak offered in answer to George Lottermoser:: Subject: [Leica] Re: Ansel Adams On Sun, 21 Dec 2008 Lottermoser George <imagist3@mac.com> wrote: >Yes. It can get in the way of "soul." >Many find Ansel's work "cold" >I find his technical mastery >the "soul" of his work; when seen in original print form. ======================================= Alan said: >>I'm one of those people. Adam's pictures leave ME cold. <<< I have to say at the expense of maybe receiving ticking boxes via the post.. The only thing that I thought was any good about his "Rock & Fern stuff. OH Yeah, mountains and moon light was?" "He was without question the coolest darkroom technician in town!" 58 years ago when I first seriously began my photographer fun thing, his work was hot stuff in all the photo magazines. I thought .. "gee this guy is real good at taking pictures of mountains and stuff in parks, I better learn everything I can about how he does it!" That was it, the more I read about him and his "ZONE system" the less interested I became! I realized he was a "shoot & soup" one sheet of film at a time, learn this zone system thing that appeared OK for rocks, ferns and mountains not going anywhere. And I began to realize he was one of the smartest "photo how to salesmen ever!" Buy into my system for a few dollars more and he sold it extremely well! His real prints are without question absolutely magnificent! A darkroom technician unparalleled! Both film processing and printing. I suppose the biggest detriment of my following him was... "I wanted to shoot for LIFE magazine and the other picture magazines around in those early days." And it didn't appear they were big on mountains and ferns! Nor was he and his zone system really into 35mm, 36 exposure rolls of film. His photography has never given me goose bumps of worldly excitement as it seems it does for fine art people. The prints are technically as perfect as it's possible to achieve, but they leave me as excited as a fish frozen in ice! And I don't think it gets much colder than that. But then I get big goose bumps of admiration over the photography of Eisenstaedt, Ralph Morse, George Silk and the others of the early years of LIFE! Now they were real photographers and masters of the photographic moments! ted