Around Monterey, there’s a saying amongst the photographers. If you buy a violin, you own a violin. If you buy a camera, you are a photographer.
Also to one of your points here, when Molly Tuttle, already a phenom at bluegrass festivals, showed up at Berklee, they gave her a bunch of tests. She did very poorly on all but one. A few years later, she was the first woman to be the International Bluegrass Association guitarist of the year. The next year, to prove it was no fluke, she won it again.
I love Molly.
Rich
Me, too. In fairness about the education part, her father made the family living teaching guitar at Gryphon in south Palo Alto. Molly went to Paly High. When I was at Stanford, I went to a concert at Paly — just across El Camino from The Farm — when another famous graduate, Joan Baez, returned to her alma mater for one great night. Her encore was The Diamonds “Little Darling”, a song she’d sung there when she was a student. Brought the house down.
Joan Baez singing "Little Darling?"
Who da thunk?
Rich
Apparently, she wasn’t always a folkie. Either that or it was all a big joke when she was in high school. Kind of like her Bob Dylan impersonations.
Adams was addressing to some extend a photographic genre that was vastly different than HCB and W. Eugene Smith. HCB's mode of operation was to find scene that he used as his stage, set up and wait for his subjects to show up on his stage. Smith cut his teeth as a war correspondent where recognizing an opportunity and getting the shot fast was important as bullets or mortar shells were often flying. He actually got injured by a mortar round which almost ended his career. They both concentrated on the small format where there were 36 exposures in a canister that was easy to change out. B&W film in their days had a lot of exposure latitude and street and photojournalism did not require the same image quality as fine art landscapes of Adams, Minor White, etc.
Adams on the other hand used a 8x10 or 11x14 camera. Many a time I have thrown my Leica M4 and a half dozen rolls of film in my backpack for a week end backpacking trip in the Colorado Rockies when I lived in Colorado or the Appalachians when I liven in the DC area and it only added a pound or so to the pack. However, when I took my 4x5 outfit with a tripod, film holders, dark cloth , etc. - I was toting a pretty heavy pack over mountain passes. The trade off of "leaving a pair of underwear home to carry another canister of film, took on a whole different meaning when you weighed out a pack with a view camera outfit at 50 pounds.
The process with a view camera takes time. With the M4, experimentation was easy. With a view camera one does not have the luxury to take a bunch of throw aways. The time to expose a negative takes longer than a 35 mm. I could develop two rolls of 35 mm film in about the same time as four sheets of 4x5 film. With 4x5 film there is not a lot of margin for "not getting it right" in the exposure. This was the driving factor for Adams to develop the Zone System to maximize the potential for getting a good properly exposed negative for the scene and how he wanted the print to look.. Previsualization was the first step in this process. It greatly helped to have and idea of what you want the final print to look like and correlate that to the light meter readings of the scene to determine to type of exposure and development to accomplish the goal of a good negative that would produce a good print with minimal work in the darkroom. Also one should not overlook that the Zone System was developed for B&W photography where one had much more control and leeway over the development process. Each sheet of film can be exposed and developed to the formula that is optima for that one shot. I would say from my film days, only about 1/2 my 4x5 negatives were throw aways - that is did not result in a print. Many of those was where I took the same scene on two sheets under slightly different conditions, e.g., one minus blue filter and one orange filter, etc. By the time I got down to 35 mm, if I printed one in four shots from a roll I was very lucky. Medium format was somewhere in the middle but closer the 35 mm than sheet film.
That is not really feasible with film as a roll of 36 shots undergoes the same development and usually uses multi-roll tanks. A lot of people never even bother to develop 35 mm film - preferring to send it to a lab. The zone system is not all that useful for roll film. It is very useful for sheet film. For large format photography the Zone System is very useful and previsualization is a fundamental aspect to that. Carmel being the home of Adams, Brett Weston, Bruce Barnbaum, etc., and their students it's no wonder that previsualization is the ethos. I visit Clyde Butcher's studio a couple times a year. I once asked Clyde how long he takes to get a shot ( most of his work is on his 12x20 view camera). His answer was about 10-15 minutes from the time he set up the camera, metered the subject, focused the scene on his ground glass, inserted the holder. At that point he would wait until the clouds and light was right, quickly remeter and change the exposure setting if necessary, remove the dark slide and shoot. All this while standing waist deep in the Everglades. 🙀
While the role of previsualization with the small format film camera and especially digital is not as formal, it is so ingrained in me that I still do it. With modern matrix metering one does not have to survey a scene with a spot meter. However, one has to make the decisions on what highlights are critical to maintain detail in and which can be allowed to clip with digital. One has to visualize which shadows are necessary to maintain detail and which are not. That is necessary to make decisions about the exposure compensation or if the it is applicable to the particular scene which to exposure bracket to expand the DR of the final image. I mostly shoot a monochrome camera, it is necessary to know which color filter to use if any or when a polarizer is needed in order to get the final image I want. That too comes from previsualization and understanding B&W to modulate the spectrum of the scene so separate the desired tonal values. Also with a CFA sensor, there is some ability to recover highlights. With a monochrome sensor, once an area is clipped-it's clipped with no ability to recover detail. So paying attention to how one wants the final image is more critical than on a CFA.
Of course with today's digital shooting 10 to 40 frames a second - it can become "spray and pray." To make a short story long - the importance of previsualization is related to the format one is shooting and the genre. Some people may choose to use their camera as a machine gun and "spray and pray" depending on "even a blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while." Some may be more deliberate in their approach. A BIF guy is going to depend on previsualization a lot less that a landscape photographer. Previsualization takes time. When I used my M4 on the street - I did little of the formal Zone System process and often taking three or four shots at slightly different conditions replace getting "the one negative." Just shoot and pray for keeper - even if it were only one a 36 exposure roll I would be happy.
However, to paraphrase a song from the band Alabama, when I was using my 4x5, it was dust off the boots, put the cowboy hat on straight and "do it the right way" to maximize the probably that every shot resulted in a print. So I think the importance of previsualization is highly dependent of a lot of factors.
You seem to be hyper focused on this learning and growing thing. Is the point of photography the process? Or the end result? Because nobody pays you for the process.
Automatic transmissions are faster and more efficient that manual ones. I prefer driving manuals, but at the end of the day, the goal is to reach my destination. Its fine to embrace the process, but everybody is different in what that process should be. I have shot AP my whole life. I would hope that people would judge my results rather than my process.
Let me extend the analogy you created. I spent many years working on my manual transmission skills. Heel and toeing. Double clutching. Using what was effectively a crash box. Operating a manual transmission was fun, and I became invested in it. All my cars had manuals except my Allison transmission truck. But at some point I was forced to admit to myself that dual clutch transmissions gave better performance. And then I went over to the dark side with AMG automatics. But I was kicking and screaming all the way.
My process with camera automation has been similar.
It was a feature of 'Band in a Box' many years ago.
I obviously don't get out much.
Rich
Here's one I made at that time with 'Band in a Box' pre-recorded auto-backing:
kronometric.org/tmp/Home%20Again.mp3
"Home Again" a la Hank B Marvin of The Shadows. Yamaha Pacifica with custom pickups. Recorded on a little Tascam 4-track.
Hey, sounds pretty durn good to me!
Just as good as any music they play at the places I go for seniors' discount dinner Happy Hour. Four-thirty to five-thirty PM. Y'know where you can't have any substitutions for dinner selections 'cuz they're all pre-frozen dishes, days or weeks before with aluminum foil covers on the heavy-duty aluminum foil trays they're reheated in and served.
Good grub, good music. Yessir.
Rich
Weeks old frozen dinners in foil tins is "good grub"? 😂
Thank you, Rich!
Adams was a classically trained pianist. He often compared photography to music in his often mentioned (to paraphrase) "the negative is the score and the print is the performance of the score." He printed about four different versions of "Moonrise."
Absolutely is it almost essential for B&W. There is even a tool to aid in the process for B&W filter - the viewing filter to help better determine the tonal range of a scene. After years of doing B&W one won't help much. However, for someone first starting to stick their toe in the water with B&W a viewing filter can be handy.
Did you read what I wrote about Michael Kenna?
I myself have done several monochromatic series that were explicitly not previsualized.
More than that. There are all the progressively more dramatic ones before the negative intensification, the ones after, and the joke ones like “No moon over Hernandez, NM”.
I guess the sarcasm didn't come through. 🙄
I once spent 5 hellish years of my life in a place where the "upscale restaurants" were the ones that removed the pre-frozen meals to actual plates after re-heating before serving.
Rich
