Frankly I find these pictures pretty awful. The composition is excellent, but the colours are garish and unpleasant. To my eyes, each image looks totally unreal and unatural.
Moreover, all three look very 'flat', with no sense of dimensional depth and poor tonal richness. Perhaps the final image is passable - just! But one and two are dreadful - like bad paintings .
Ansel must be turning in his grave... These tasteless digital 'fabrications' are the very antithesis of the rich sumptuous tonality and 3D depth-perspectives he laboured so hard to achieve in his prints.
J M Hughes
I must say that your review is pretty harsh.
Maybe - it was seeing all those uncritical 'Awesome' and 'Wow' posts that made me want to inject a little reality into this thread - LOL!
Considering that the pictures were taken with a camera and lens that can't come close to what Ansel Adams used (an 8 x 10 field camera at least and a leaf shutter lens with a f stop range maybe up to f64 and the ability to tweak the depth of field and perspective with an adjustable lens board) and not to mention that the forest has grown quite a bit since the original shot was taken which really detracts from the sense of depth as compared to the original. And of course the lighting is completely different.
I think it's rather sad that - with all the progress made in every sphere of phtography - we get
worse results today, compared with 70 years ago.
While I don't particularly care for the colors in the first two, I don't find them horrible. What I would really like to see is a B&W rendition of the third one.
Me too! I think all three would work FAR better in B&W.
Camas didn't say he was able to match what Adams did, just that he was trying to emulate him and that it is learning experience for him. I'd say nice try and keep at it. One of these times you'll get up there and the light will be just right.
Looking at Camas' shots, I'd say his manipulations of contrast and colour have made the scene look a bit like a small plastic model. When I look at the pictures, I don't think 'I'm there!' - the scale and grandeur of the scene seems
emasculated .
But - dare I say it? - Ansel Adams' original looks a bit 'plastic' too. The mountains look like they've been pasted into place, as does the sky - hopefully it
was the original sky, or did Adams paste in a 'better' one in afterwards? He did that sort of thing, as we all know!
For this sort of photography to work, it needs to look effortlessly natural and 'real' - it should convincingly suggest space, depth, and atmosphere, with 'correct' perspectives, in order to create a believable impression of dimensionality and scale.
Unfortunately, these qualities tend to be destoyed when you manipulate the mid tones to create a more evened-out tonality - darkening skies, and lightening foliage, for example. You see this equalisation of extremes all the time in so-called HDR images, and it creates some horrible results.
In my view, HDR should be called LDR (Low Dynamic Range), since the 'dynamic range' has been completely ironed out - like a piece of music that resolutely stays at the same loudness level, no matter how many instruments are playing.
J M Hughes
I completely put b&w out of my mind to avoid any impression that I may be trying to 'copy' or even 'compete' with the master. Thanks for asking dnorth12.
