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January 25th, 2012
While I’m not much into New Year’s resolutions, I’m giving myself a goal to get into the darkroom more this year, and I’ve been doing some digging around in my files of as-yet unprinted images. And there are quite a few! The digital age has allowed me to experiment with images of interest and I’m really looking forward to bringing them to life in silver.
I’m happy to share with you these three “new” images, and offer them at a discounted price before they become available to galleries and the general public. For purchasing information, simply click on each photo.
Clouds and Reflections, Glacier Bay, Alaska 1988 
Ansel Adams was once asked if there was any place in the world he could visit to photograph, where would it be (besides the givens of Yosemite and the Sierra)? His answer was pretty immediate: “I’d like to go back to Alaska – but Scotland was pretty good, too.” In 1988 I had the good fortune to be able to accompany my wife on (for her) a business cruise to Alaska and the Inside Passage. One of the highlights was an afternoon in Glacier Bay, hearing great chunks of ice break free from their hosts, sailing off into melting oblivion. Another amazing experience was visiting Sitka, where there seemed to be a bald eagle sitting on every tree top. Photographically, though, the massive glaciers and stillness of the bay were the visual highlights of the trip.
 Dune Detail, Sunrise, Death Valley 2008
A morning trip to the dunes near Stovepipe Wells in Death Valley rarely leaves one unrewarded for the somewhat arduous trek out from the road. Starting out at first light (so there is enough light to avoid rudely stepping on an innocent sidewinder…) it is usually no problem to get into the heart of the dunes before the sun peeks out over the crest of the Funeral Range to the east. This image was done during one of a number of workshops I have led in the Eastern Sierra and Death Valley. Usually, I work with larger expanses of the landscape, but on this early May morning, there was nary a cloud anywhere – and I was feeling Ansel’s lament of “there’s nothing worse than a bald-headed sky.” Working with my 4×5 camera, I decided to ignore the distance and morning haze, and concentrate on smaller views of the sun just illuminating abstracts of dune forms. I just checked my negative file, and found that this was the only image I made on the dunes on that trip – but I like it!
Rocks, Pools and Reflections, Badwater, Death Valley 2001 
The quietness of Death Valley around sunrise always has an underlying tone of magic. During this late September workshop, we had just had a wonderful sunrise session at Zabriskie Point, overlooking Golden Canyon to the south and Manly Beacon to the west, with wonderful clouds adding to the occasion. When we had satisfied ourselves with that location, the morning was still too lovely to declare it time for breakfast, so we went south to Badwater. At 282 feet below sea level, it is the lowest spot in North America, amazingly only about 85 air miles from 14,505-foot Mount Whitney to the west, the highest point in the United States outside of Alaska. The sun had not yet reached the valley floor in this spot so the view north was a wonder of quiet reflections. Sadly, this photograph can no longer be made. A year or two later, the Park Service, in their efforts to protect the ecosystem in and around the area, built a raised dock around and over the pools, obscuring the natural lines in this image.
Each print is made personally by me according to current museum standards, signed, numbered, mounted and overmatted, and ready to frame. Image size is approximately 14 x 18, overmatted to 22 x 28.
My prints in this size normally start at $750, but I am offering these new prints for a limited time at 25% off base price, or $562.50, plus shipping.
The offer extends from now through Sunday, February 12th. You can contact me directly or use my brand-new shopping cart on the website.
I anticipate approximately two to four weeks for delivery to ensure the quality of each individual order. After this inaugural offering, print prices will return to full price.
Tags: Alan Ross, Alaska, Ansel Adams, Badwater, Black White Photography, Death Valley, Glacier Bay, Photography, Photography Blog
Posted in Announcement | No Comments »
January 22nd, 2012
One of the most challenging things in creating a strong image in photography is the need to find order in chaos. In the urban jungle there are wires, poles, signs, traffic and the like. In the natural world there are rocks, bushes, branches and landforms all contributing to visual mayhem.
In an earlier writing I discussed the fact that it is point of view that creates structure in a photograph, and that one’s choice of lens is after the fact and serves only to effect the most agreeable cropping. But making that choice of lens is often a lot easier said than done. Looking through a viewfinder or at the upside-down image on a groundglass, it is easy to become somewhat fixated on the subject itself, rather than the elements of the composition.
Regular use of a cut-out viewing card can do wonders for tightening up your seeing and compositional strengths. Ansel Adams was a great proponent of using a viewing card and routinely included them in workshop student packets. Completely low-tech, the “tool” is simply a card with a hole cut out in the same shape as your film / image format.
When you are standing on the spot where you plan to make your photograph, instead of looking through your camera to explore the structure of the image, hold the card up to your scene, moving it subtly left, right, up down – AND nearer to and farther away from your eye. You have what amounts to a zoom lens with infinite focal lengths from at-your-nose to full-arm’s-length away! If the card is white, the scene before you can even look like it is already mounted ready for display! Neat?
Wait! There’s more! If the hole in the card is the same size as the format you are using, you can even tell pretty nearly just what focal length to use. If you are using a 4×5 camera and the card’s hole is about 4×5 inches, the distance away from your eye is the same as the appropriate focal length! If the card is about eight inches from your eye for the right framing, that would indicate a 210mm lens (eight inches is 203mm). If you are using a 6×7 camera and have a 6x7cm hole in your card, when the card is about six inches from your eye, that would suggest a 150mm lens!
When I’m working with my 8×10 camera, because of its weight and bulk, I don’t usually haul it around with me while I am exploring a subject. I often leave it in the truck, or parked peacefully under a tree, and instead go for a walk with my cut-out card. Once I have found my “spot” I’ll mark it with a rock or something and hop back to get the camera, already knowing pretty well what lens I am going to start with. Now, you can imagine that a card with an 8×10 hole in it would be a bit awkward – and it would be – but instead I just use my 4×5 card and double the indicated focal length. Thus, if the card is nine inches from my eye, that would indicate the 450mm lens.
In truth, I don’t always have a card with me, but my hands are large enough to form an approximately 4×5 frame, and that works just fine.
Tags: Alan Ross, Ansel Adams, Photo Composition, Photograph, Photography, Viewing Card
Posted in Photo Philosophy | 2 Comments »
January 12th, 2012
It comes as quite a surprise to a lot of the photographers I work with that the only thing that changes when you use a different focal-length lens is the cropping of your image!
Optical aberrations aside, short focal-length, or “wide-angle,” lenses do not distort close subjects, and long focal-length, or telephoto, lenses do not compress subject features. What really causes these familiar effects discussed so often in popular texts is a change of perspective: a change in the camera’s physical position relative to your subject.
When you move in close to a subject, it becomes very large in relation to its background. So, that over-large nose you get with a wide-angle-lens portrait is because you’ve probably moved in very close to the subject in order to fill the frame, and the nose, being closest to the lens, is now very large in relation to the ears. This is a matter of your proximity to the subject and has nothing to do with the lens itself.
When you look at a distant scene through a long focal-length, or telephoto, lens elements in the scene may appear compressed, almost right on top of each other. Once again, this has nothing to do with the lens, but is simply a matter of the tight framing on the subject. If you put the camera down and frame the scene just as tightly with your hands, the elements of the scene will appear as “compressed” as they did through the lens.
What about zoom lenses as opposed to fixed focal-length lenses? Do they help make your choice easier? Well, yes and no. Assuming the optics are up to snuff, a zoom can provide a great deal of convenience – it’s a zillion focal-lengths in one piece of hardware. But that convenience can lead to overly casual, rather than critical, vision. Imagine a photographer out for a walk. He (or she) comes across a detail or a scene that interests him. Camera goes up to eye, hand zooms lens to frame the subject, auto-focus and metering do their jobs, shutter goes click, and it’s on down the path. Would the image have been more powerful if our photographer had moved in close to some boulder in the foreground, making it monolithic in relation to the background? Maybe. Or maybe backing up a bit might have let some tree branches frame the scene.
The point in all this is that to maximize the impact of a visual statement it is important to give thought to the image structure first. Is the composition better closer in? Farther back? Up, down left or right?
Once you pick your camera position, then choose the focal length that gives the cropping you want. If your first guess is too tight, use a shorter lens, if it’s too loose, use a longer lens. If you don’t have a lens that is quite right, use one slightly shorter than you would like and crop. That’s the lens to use!
Tags: Alan Ross, Ansel Adams, Choosing a Lens, Focal Length, Photography
Posted in Lenses | No Comments »
December 30th, 2011
There has been a lot of talk on the Internet lately about whether Ansel Adams would have embraced digital photography if he were alive today. From what I can tell, most everyone seems to think that he would be enjoying both “shooting digital” and HDR. Having been his full time photo assistant in Carmel from 1974 to 1979 with continued close association for the next five years until his death in 1984, I think I’d like to take this opportunity to weigh in with my own thoughts.
Let’s imagine that it is in the early 1980’s and that today’s digital technology was available then. To ponder to what degree he might have “gone digital” it should be useful to consider his nature, and his interests in technology and photography.
Even from his very early years, Ansel was fascinated by science and technology in general. But rather than being a modernist, he was very much a classicist. He never had any interest in anything that was “the rage.” He had no interest in the craze or technology of motion pictures – except when Polaroid brought out their short-lived Polavision, and that was only because it was a Polaroid product. Upon its demise he had no interest in VCRs.
He was just about 80 years old when he bought his first television, but his personal involvement with the computer age began in the early 1980’s when he began writing his autobiography on an IBM word processor. Even in his own work in photography, he never had the newest-best of anything – except when Hasselblad set him up with a new 500C camera and a few lenses. Even most of his large-format gear was a mix of old and used, but it served his purpose.
By the 1980’s, digital technology was just starting to wend its way from research labs into practical use, and he was very enthusiastic about the quality the new scanning technology was giving to the reproductions in his new books. I have no doubt that he would have marveled at what Photoshop could offer – but I also think that this excitement would have been mostly directed at making repairs to damage or defects in his film archive. He had images from Alaska where mosquitoes had gotten into his 8×10 and were neatly silhouetted by having landed on the film before exposure! And then there were all the films damaged in his 1937 darkroom fire.
Color work didn’t really interest him – most of his color imagery was either on assignment for Kodak or testing films for Polaroid. So he would have likely passed up on the pixel passion in that regard.
I think he would also very likely regard current capture technology to still fall something short of what he could do with film. I’m sure he would have a digital camera of some sort but regard it as an intriguing work-in-progress. I can easily see him using it for some portrait work but think it would be left neglected in the car if he encountered a Moonrise, Hernandez, or Clearing Winter Storm.
A single exposure on a piece of BW negative film can record a hugely greater dynamic range than current digital devices, and while HDR techniques can certainly make up for this, it requires an extra bit of techno-tinkering and doesn’t offer the tangible gratification of holding a freshly developed sheet of 8×10 or 4×5 film. There is also nothing intrinsically permanent about a digital image.
In summary, I think Ansel would love scanning and Photoshop. He would have a fairly current digital camera and enjoy the immediacy and other advantages of pixel pictures. I think he would still prefer the look of a silver print over inkjet (as I still do), and that means film. He would keep a close eye on advances and have no qualms about working in the digital world if the technology fully met his own creative standards.
Tags: Alan Ross, Ansel Adams, Ansel Adams Digital, Ansel Adams HDR
Posted in Ansel Adams | 18 Comments »
December 6th, 2011
Removing Artists’ Block
 Golden Gate Bridge, North Tower and Rocks, 1989 On Assignment for The Bank of America When I first moved to Carmel to work with Ansel Adams in 1974, I made several significant images within the first month or two. Then for the next five years pretty close to nothing.
After I moved to San Francisco in 1979 to open my own studio, I got an assignment to photograph in the Big Sur-Carmel area, and I made two significant photos in one day. One was only a mile south of Ansel’s house!
In 1989 I accepted a contract with a large advertising agency in San Francisco for Bank of America. Project? Shoot the Golden Gate Bridge. Well, I grew up in Sausalito, California, and it is the first town on the north side of the bridge. I NEVER had ANY desire to make an image of something so familiar (and so over-photographed) but I took the job and the incentive kicked me into making a few of my very best images.
Now, having lived in Santa Fe for over 18 years, I find I hardly ever get a camera out at home. The reality? Over-familiarity and the distractions of daily life. I still am amazed by the boggling thunderclouds that build up in the summer and fall – but I haven’t DONE anything about them in years. Errands to run, darkroom work to do, etc.
In the early 1960’s, Ansel Adams, who was born, grew up in, and was still living in San Francisco, took on an assignment that essentially was going to be Ansel Adams’ San Francisco. Always a hard worker, he took to the task with enthusiasm – but after a few months, and a few fair images, he conceded that he was too close to the subject and regretfully bowed out. Conversely, even though he maintained a house in Yosemite, and his wife and children lived there pretty much full time, Yosemite wasn’t his daily environment, and it remained easy for him to maintain his visual enthusiasm about the place.
I think the most difficult thing for any of us, whose work is in the recording and expressive interpretation of our surroundings, is to work “close to home”. I am in Dallas as I write this, and I am promising myself that I will get a camera out when I get home to Santa Fe.
Some times you just have to prime the pump.
Tags: Alan Ross, Ansel Adams, Golden Gate Bridge Photo, Photography
Posted in Ansel Adams, Photo Philosophy | 3 Comments »
August 5th, 2011
Thirty-seven years ago today marks the end of my first week as Ansel’s full-time assistant. What a week! It started as I drove my car up a wooded road in Carmel, parked under the pines, and walked apprehensively up to the front door. My knock was greeted by a beaming smile and a “How ya doin’ man?” Pure Ansel!
My first assignment was to make some order out of the chaos of print boxes and equipment that were temporarily housed in the carport. Ansel had just had some major renovations done in his work room, and everything had been moved out of the way. What I noticed as I was sorting through prints was that Ansel had made quite a few very ordinary photographs. I was somewhat stunned to learn that he had no illusions and no expectations that every piece of film he exposed would wind up being another one of what he fondly called his “Mona Lisas.” As an awe-struck young photographer in the presence of “The Master,” this revelation came as an incredible relief and released me from the burden of expecting myself to produce only perfection. Following Ansel’s model, it was better to experiment and try things that might work, and openly and simply respond to feelings, than to over-intellectualize when photographing. In fact, I soon learned that one of Ansel’s favorite phrases was, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” Not a day goes by, even now, that I don’t hear him reminding me of this, and it’s something I try to emphasize with my students.
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July 31st, 2011
People often ask how I managed to land a job with the man who would become the most noted photographer of the 20th-century. Ansel always liked to say that “chance favors the prepared mind,” and maybe that’s what happened. Here’s the story…you can decide!
After graduating from UC Berkeley in 1971, I had the good fortune to land a job as studio assistant for M. Halberstadt, the most in-demand advertising photographer in San Francisco at the time. Hal, as he liked to be called, had been Moholy Nagy’s photo assistant at the School of Design in Chicago, and was innovative in his vision and a stickler for technical excellence. He was also a long-time friend of Ansel Adams–they even had an assistant in common, although somewhat before my time.
In 1973, Hal retired and closed his studio, leaving me an unemployed freelancer. I had met Ansel the year before in Yosemite, so I worked up the nerve to write and ask if he needed an assistant. He wrote back almost by return mail, saying he didn’t need anyone at the moment, but because of my successful track record with Hal (who was known for chewing through assistants), he would be delighted to have me assist some of the numerous workshops at the Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite, beginning that June. By July 1974, I was running the darkroom for Ansel’s “Making of a Photographic Book” workshop. A few days into the session, Ansel had his business manager pull me aside and ask if I would be interested in moving to Carmel to work full-time. I thought about that for maybe a microsecond!
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March 24th, 2011
Posted in Newsletter | No Comments »
March 17th, 2011
JOINT STATEMENT BY THE ANSEL ADAMS PUBLISHING RIGHTS TRUST, RICK NORSIGIAN AND PRS MEDIA PARTNERS, LLC REGARDING SETTLEMENT OF LITIGATION
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
San Francisco and Los Angeles, California
March 14, 2011
On August 23,2010, The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust filed a civil complaint in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California against PRS Media Partners, LLC and Rick Norsigian. On December 28, 2010, Rick Norsigian and PRS Media Partners filed a Counterclaim against the Trust in the same court.
The parties deny the validity of the claims brought against them. PRS Media and Norsigian believe that sixty five glass plate negatives purchased by Rick Norsigian were created by Ansel Adams, and prepared a report they believe authenticated the Negatives as being created by Ansel Adams. The Trust disputes the conclusions of the report and that the Negatives were created by Ansel Adams.
The parties have now agreed to resolve these disputes and have entered into a confidential settlement agreement in which each side assumes its own costs and fees in connection with the claims. Under said agreement, Rick Norsigian and PRS Media agree to not use Ansel Adams’ name or likeness or the ANSEL ADAMS trademark in connection with the sales, promotion or advertisement of negatives, prints, posters, or other merchandise based on negatives. Norsigian and PRS Media may continue to sell negatives, prints, posters and other merchandise associated with negatives, subject to a disclaimer approved by The Trust, and provided they do so in a manner consistent with state and federal law. Further, both parties have agreed not to make any defamatory statements about the other or unlawfully interfere in each other’s businesses. As a result of the agreement, the parties today submitted a joint request asking the Court to dismiss the complaint and counterclaim without prejudice.
Posted in Ansel Adams, News | No Comments »
March 12th, 2011
GALLERIES
Andrew Smith Gallery, Santa Fe, Classic Images, next to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.
Sun To Moon Gallery, Dallas Design District, contemporary photographers, traditional color landscapes to gelatin silver, bromoil and platinum/palladium-over-gold-leaf prints.
Ansel Adams Gallery, Yosemite, Workshops, books, posters and…
—- Ansel Adams’ Special Edition Prints
Scott Nichols Gallery, San Francisco
LUMAS, Based in Berlin, Galleries in Germany (8), Zurich, Paris, New York, Vienna, London.
SUPPLIERS / RESOURCES
Reflective Image Studios, Drums scans, LVT film negs from digital files, printing and retouching.
Freestyle Photo, Hollywood – the largest offering of darkroom consumables I have ever seen!
Print File, Orlando, FL, I get all my Rising Museum Board here.
Photo Eye, Books and Gallery, Santa Fe.
Yosemite Web-Cam
Santa Fe Information, Web-Cam
Posted in LINKS | No Comments »
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