WHAT WOULD ANSEL ADAMS DO?

I was talking to some people who were looking for a digital camera that would take black and white pictures. For some reason the thought came to me: What would Ansel Adams think about the digital age in photography? I know that he did some color work but of course most of the pictures that he produced were in black and white. He used a very large format and did take his work to a higher level with excellent darkroom work. I do know that the development of the zone system which gave the images a true spectrum from pure black to pure white by Adams and Fred Archer and made black and white photography a challenge for all of us who wanted to do all of the work ourselves. The new digital cameras will only do those things that the manufacturer has set in the camera. If you want to do many of those things that you want to try then you must get a more advanced model that will allow you to work your own magic. It is not always possible to fix what the camera has recorded later on the computer. You may not have a darkroom but you can use the computer to do many of the same things.
As for Ansel Adams would he have made the same pictures? NO! He was not limited by the use of the same formula all of his career. His work would have been shaped in a different direction today. He would have had to work with today’s cameras and had some of the same problems that today’s photographers have had to endure. Think about the slow speed in resetting on all but the most recent digital cameras. To get some of those famous pictures he had to get the right moment and the right exposure to insure that the picture he took was the one that he saw in his mind. Today we are sometimes limited by the fact that our equipment may not do what we want when we want it to do something. I know that Adams was limited by the equipment but he was in complete control and had the ability to adjust many things that today are automatically done by the camera. Is that really better? I do think that a photographer of the caliber of Ansel Adams can always do a better job than a computer that is set for the most general situations.
Could our first photographers do as well today? Yes! The reason is not the technology. It is because they had the ability to see what is in a good picture and they knew what to do to achieve that goal with the equipment that they had available to them. They would have used today’s level of technology to advance their art. Some of the newest cameras I think would actually get in the way of their creativity and they would have to show were they could go around the technology to show us the pictures that they felt.