camerapapi Loc: Miami, Fl.

Each one of us is different. We have our style and we shoot the things we like. Some are more artists than others.
Like you I tend to make my images as close to normal as I can possibly make them. Like you I have nothing against manipulation of the images.
Ansel Adams did not manipulate his images more in the darkroom because he did not have digital and Photoshop at the time.

Snoopypood

Any slight change in the color temperature of the light source will fool the AWB. Even with flash, the ambient light will have some impact. You can either measure the color temperature of the light with an expensive meter or you can lock it in on a picture that pleases you or if you are outdoors, use one of the color temp adjusting devices out there and lock the color temp on your camera for that shoot.

via the lens Loc: Northern California, near Yosemite NP

Perhaps you have not studied AA in any depth? He was a great manipulator of images in the darkroom, manipulating film and development bath chemicals as needed, and used BW filters as needed. In fact, many people complained, upon actually seeing Yosemite Valley, that it did not look like Ansel's photograph. Through the years several of his well-known photographs looked different as he continued to fine tune them in development. Why not get the absolute best overall result you can, with whatever it takes to do that?

Retina Loc: Near Charleston,SC

It was the deterministic approach of Ansel Adams to capture shadows and not blow out highlights as explained in the Zone System that make shooting RAW so valuable for me. If it helps capture a scene, I don't consider going for more latitude using PP over the top even for a purist. (Lost shadows and blocked up highlights are artifacts of bad technique, nothing good about them unless it's intentional). Maybe along the same lines, I don't care for learning PP either but for other reasons. I admit that as a programmer who loves to get computers to talk with each other and share data struggles when it comes to using a moderately complex GUI. Practice definitely helps, though. Still, I hope we are not critical of those who use PP and computer graphics as a canvas to create beautiful works. It's just a different art form using photography as the starting point. This is an old topic here, but I will repeat what I wrote earlier. Straight Out Of the Camera (SOOC) is a form of instant PP based on pre-determined parameters decided on by engineers who built the firmware in the camera, though we don't call it "post" because it is instant, like instant coffee or an automatic transmission. More goes into the preparation by others upstream such that by the time we get it, there is less we can do adjust the final result. We have fewer parameters under our control because we trusted them to others. It's awfully convenient, though. My favorite will be the Classic Chrome when I get work up the justification to buy a Fujifilm mirrorless.

Tommy II Loc: Northern Illinois

As long as you enjoy it; that's all that counts.

Eddy Vortex

I don't feel that a photo has to be photoshop free to be a "real photo". Ansel certainly photoshopped his work !

via the lens Loc: Northern California, near Yosemite NP

FYI...Photoshop was created to a large degree based on what photographers did with their film work. Film manipulation has been around since the beginning of its birth. Ansel's film manipulation was based on knowing what the chemicals he used could do and how to use them to his advantage. In at least one of his film images, some letters that a high school put on a hillside were dissolved with some chemical to remove them from the image, although his assistant did it Ansel approved.

cytafex Loc: Clarksburg MA

Ansel said about his photographs, to reflect what was seen and felt. For me photographs are a separate reality connected to the original event by photons that are rendered to a medium. We don't have a tree, but silver or pigments on paper (or what have you) from the photons and it is up to us personally to decide what to do with the information. Ansel and some of his friends from the group f/64 broke with popular trends in photography at the time and pursued images that were in sharp focus. Today we also have trends which tend to be wide focus views with saturated colors. Not my cup of tea as often the scenes may change but the look is the same and I'm not referring to a thread connecting images together. In the end it's a personal choice for processing (many choices) with photography and "how" we make a photograph and what matters is what is seen in the frame.

Bushpilot Loc: Minnesota

In most cases I try to make "art", not just document a scene.

lsupremo Loc: Palm Desert, CA

I spent a learning week with Mr. Adams in 1969 and the first thing he told us was" if you can't make your image bigger or more important than what you see, don't press the button. Just remember what it looked like and just cherish the memory"

Indiana Loc: Huntington, Indiana

Agree, As of now it is up to the viewer to determine if the representation is Art (post processing) , or if it is a representation of what the photographer actually saw (out of camera). Often the two cross and leave the viewer guessing.

bpulv Loc: Buena Park, CA

When you shoot with color film, you must make sure that the color temperature of the light and film are matched. If you use tungsten film (3400K) and your color temperature meter indicates 4000K, you must use the proper deckamire color conversion filter on you camera to achieve proper color balance. Also, when you process your color prints, you must again balance the colors using filters to ensure accurate reproduction.

SIMILAR RULES APPLY TO DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY! Did you verify that your camera's white balance was set properly by using a white card adjustment? If not, your picture's color will not match the original. You cannot depend on automatic color balance for critical reproduction. Additionally, if you edited the picture, in all probability you compounded the mismatch because you were trying to match the original box color using an uncalibrated computer monitor. Regardless of what your eye saw, if the monitor is not calibrated it will not display the colors correctly and so when you adjust your picture's color it will appear to match the color on the box while the information you input to the computer will be wrong. What you see is not what you will get. Buy or borrow a Spyder 5+ or similar monitor calibrator and try again. Color monitors must be calibrated for color gamut and brightness to present colors to the eye accurately. Furthermore, if you are going to print a picture, the printer must be calibrated to the same color gamut as your monitor.

Bobspez Loc: Southern NJ, USA

There is a difference in white balance it's true, but also a bigger difference in saturation and vibrance (eg. a reddish orange appearing pale orange in the picture). Unless there is direct sunlight, pictures often seem less saturated and vibrant than viewing the actual subject.
As another posted stated, processing often tries to capture what was done with film. With a digital camera, I never get the deep blue skies I get with Velvia 50 slide film. Even if other colors seem natural, the sky is paler than film, or than what the eyes see. So processing the pic brings it closer to film and closer to reality.

rehess Loc: South Bend, Indiana, USA

Actually, the scene is muted without sunlight. Pictures taken with color negative film, especially under heavy overcast, always looked too saturated to my eyes. When Grantland Rice wrote about 'blue gray October skies' he was drawing a word picture that people could identify with.

added: Kodak and Fuji competed in pleasing color print users, who were more interested that their pictures delivered 'pop' than that they show what the user actually saw.

gwilliams6

I have a few limited original Ansel Adams Yosemite prints (printed by his son from the original negatives) Yes Ansel shot great images, using the Zone system which manipulates the exposure and film processing to achieve a wide dynamic range of tones. He also did a lot of darkroom manipulation afterwards to get the sky and tones as dark or light as he liked.

There was a recent post of his famed "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico" which showed the originally exposed negative (which was fairly flat toned) and the final print with the dramatically darkened and contrast-enhanced sky and foreground. If I can find the web link, I will post it in this thread.

So yes as a longtime pro shooter myself, I can testify that we most often did wonderful darkroom work to get the most out of our B&W film images, akin to what is now done in Photoshop and Lightroom.

I teach photography at the University level, B&W film classes , Photojournalism and Digital Photography classes too. I teach my 35mm B&W film students how to correct and enhance tones etc .in the darkroom, just as I teach my Digital Photography students similar techniques in PS and Lightroom. It is the artists' vision and their right to make the visual statement they choose to make, or not change.

But in my Photojournalism classes, we have a different mantra, non manipulation beyond minor exposure corrections. Why, because a Photojournalist has the burden and iron-clad responsibilty of telling the truth to the public, even if the photographer's work takes an inevitable point-of-view as they tell a story.

Being an Award-winning Photojournalist for four decades, I thank those photo editors that caught me early in my career, submitting over-manipulated news photos ( because I was trying to make the news shot more dramatic or eliminate a distracting part of the image). They made me reprint it to reflect the truth of the scene and subject, as presenting the truth to our readers was paramount to our journalistic integrity.

So I have done it both ways and taught it both ways, I just knew when to separate art and reportage, and I have taught my students the same.

Still means I love my Ansel Adams prints and revere him and others for their stunning B&W work .

Keep shooting what you want, how you want, and processed and manipulated, or not. It is all good. Cheers