Yes I am being unrealistically harsh only to offer an exaggerated alternate point of view Devil’s advocate may have been a poor choice of cliche – my understanding of that terms common day-to-day use is to describe someone that offers one or more alternate points of view to common beliefs, wisdom, or first thoughts. As in let me be the devil’s advocate here, usually offering a completely opposite point of view.

RB

I have an understanding and healthy respect for AA’s contributions but if you have not figured it out I am a natural born devil’s advocate. I do want to call you on one minor point – AA arguably has contributed more to educating others on a prescriptive approach to controlling ones process but I will absolutely guarantee you that ever single solitary thing that he prescribed was used and being used one way or another by countless other photographers way before AA. In fact I would wager that EW had a high level of control over his process as well – he just didn’t think that it was important to prescribe, codify, explain, or educate people on. In my personal experience people that struggle with understanding a particular aspect of some endeavor feel the need to talk about it and explain it because they make the assumption that other people also struggle with the same aspect – they are usually correct to some degree – this does not mean that everyone struggles with the same aspect. The things that people don’t talk about or explain may come intuitively and easy therefore they assume that everyone must understand it just as easily. Get my point?

RB

Hate to be the odd man out here but Edward Weston taught me more about photography than AA ever did. I think that he understood a bit about his materials as well. My point being AA was the first guy to codify his process that happened to correspond to nothing new that people had been doing for ages.

Here is my take – it can be overstated and often is. He taught a bunch of people a bunch of stuff to do with no why. Hello… that is why we have people looking for “Ansel Adams Lightroom Presets” in google.

RB

Sounds like we are in complete agreement – I think.

RB

I am the worlds worst landscape photographer – not my thing. These were shot on a D200 on the balcony off my office at random while trying to figure out what the hell somebody would want with an Ansel Adams Lightroom preset. Not my best work.

Spot metered the bright areas of the clouds, placed them at zone VII (meter reading +2 stops), knowing the D200 I could have put them at Zone VII 1/2 and still been okay but didn’t feel like working too hard. Used a gradient to bring up the foreground about a stop but still left it dark so the roof of my next door neighbor’s house was not too prominent. BW conversion with red filter, dodged the crap out of the trees in the bottom left. Burnt in all of the cloud detail. Did both the dodging and burn in such a way that the shadows in the clouds and highlights in the trees were really close to the same values then increased to the shit out of the contrast with a typical strong s-curve for lots of local separation.

So I guess that would be the preset.

RB

Just one quick comment regarding AA’s books, codification of his (and lots of others that came before him) and what he didn’t tell you. You went right to composition et al. in your comments and you are right but…

I was not at all even thinking about these types of things – I was much more sticking only to the process types of things in terms of getting images on paper the way he “sees”. I have seen plenty of pretty smart people that study the zone system inside and out and then proceed to put all the pieces together in a very very strict and systematic way where they get exactly what they want but not what they expected nor anything resembling AA’s preferred print tonality. Example – High contrast scene, optimum exposure, calibrated development process using precisely calibrated film speed and N-1/N-2 development. Scads of detail in the negative and perfect print on Grade 2 paper that looks like a big flat lifeless piece of shit. Hmmm…. all my clouds are lifeless – where is my sparkle? WTF. Another example roll film developed N high contrast scene, printed on grade 1, detail in the negative but highlights still gone in the print – let’s burn them in a tiny bit – okay there we go – still looks like shit.

What the distinguished Mr. Adams fails to discuss in anything but a passing allusion is that 99.9% of the time he does exactly opposite of what A LOT of people’s interpretation of the USE his zone system codification happens to be. Take any of the notable black and white photographers over the last two centuries and you will be hard pressed to find any of them that ever ever ever use N- development or contrast grades lower than 2. For the very small number of occasions that they do the circumstances are extreme and they happen to be using a film that blocks up in the highlights. Most modern films (I am talking about post 1960 here) never block up in the highlights – some of the newer ones are insane in terms of almost never shouldering off (TMAX).

The basic piece of extremely simple instruction that may not be completely missing but is very very well hidden is something like – hey do what you want but for 90% of everything I like my prints with tons of separation in the mids and will dodge and burn the crap out of my prints to get that separation – I will not compress the entire tonal range of the scene to fit on the paper.

Now obviously I am going off the deep end here and the reality is that there are a lot of amazing images out there that do the opposite but they are not a typical AA style landscape.

RB

I think that we could agree that if Ansel were shooting digital, his passion for the image would not have stopped once he got it the way that he wanted it onscreen. It would have to be printed, and just so, to be called complete.

RB has done an excellent job in his film posts in talking about the various effects of developers and chemicals which are so critical of these types of images and their overall look. We should also understand that even with a digital image, there are different kinds of papers and profiles that also affect the final image.

Ansel was also passionate about printing, so much that he wrote a book that was solely focused on the print and the process of printing.

I feel that it is important to remember that even if Ansel had a Lightroom preset (which I’m sure that he would share) he would also impress that the printed image is the culmination of photographic efforts and just as important a process as image manipulation in software.

While I wasn’t among those who asked the question, I’d offer the observation that the question itself could only have been asked in the digital age. Not for the obvious reason that preset implies a digital process, but Digital has so vastly simplified the process of making technically adequate or even good photographs, that a whole generation has come to expect “presets” or “filters” to be able to provide ready made solutions with little or no effort, and little or no understanding of the underlying process.
This is, for most people, a very good thing. The quality of the snapshots we have of our kids, and occasions has improved greatly,sharing these images electronically has brought great joy to all of us.
The downside of this convenience is that it has made a true understanding of the underlying process more difficult and for many, unnecessary.
The recent series about “shooting real film” here underscores that point.
The essence of Ansel Adams legacy is to “do the work” of understanding your underlying processes so completely that you will be able to pre-visualize a result and the create it with confidence.
And while RB is correct that he didn’t do what we’ve come to call tutorials for specific images, I don’t think he thought it was necessary. If one were to do the work described in his books, you would come away with a level of knowledge and control of process that would enable you to achieve the desired result.
So if asking for an Ansel Adams Preset means how do I get my landscape photographs to look more like his, my answer would be that while his “Look” did partially come from things that could be emulated by a software preset (orange or red filters for dark skies and fluffy clouds, manipulations of exposure and processing to create higher dynamic range -HDR), it came most from knowing where to stand,Knowing his equipment, his choice of lenses, including on many occasions, the use of wide field lenses and getting off the ground to create his “Near-Far” compositions (he had platforms on all his trucks) and the patience to wait for the light and weather to come to him, and above all deeply understanding the processes and materials of his craft.
While a preset could help with the former group, digital photography has done nothing to change the latter group.
And that’s probably a good thing if not always an easy thing.