#photography nerditry:
#photography nerditry:
#photography nerditry:
In 1943, Ansel Adams (with camera) was granted access to the Manzanar Japanese-American internment camp to document the people held there. While Adams was not quite as a great a portrait or documentary photographer as he was at capturing the American landscape, he gave his subjects rich humanity and life.
He subsequently donated both his original negatives as well as some prints to the Library of Congress, without restriction. You can see them at
https://www.loc.gov/collections/ansel-adams-manzanar/about-this-collection/
This is an extraordinary collection, not just for the extraordinary subject material, but because for many of the images we have access to both Adams' final result (scans of his prints) as well as "straight" scans from the negatives. It shows how utterly essential darkroom post-processing can be to the final impact of a fine art photograph. And now you can download the scans and see what you can do with them yourself in, eg, Photoshop or Capture One.
Consider this image, a simple composition of birds on a power line.
Here's a straight scan from the negative:
https://www.loc.gov/resource/ppprs.00162/And here's what Adams did with it:
https://www.loc.gov/resource/ppprs.00291/@[email protected] My favourite example of this from Adams is Moonrise, Hernandez
@[email protected] I've read that his darkroom game was second to none.
@[email protected] great thread, thanks