Peterff: Thank you. There is no wrong way to say it. I am a retired high school science teacher. I was the entire science department (including photography) for thirty years in a small high school and am now substituting at a high school in the mountains because retirement was driving me crazy. It is hard to surprise me and even harder to hurt my feelings. When I had a chance to spend some time at Ansel's home in the 1960s, my wife (then girlfriend) was even invited to join us. We were left with some amazing shared memories. We have been through many, many things together in the almost fifty years we have been married. When we were hit by the fire, we talked about the situation and decided that we had only two options. We could give up or we could put our energies into moving forward. We chose the latter. I was a backpacker and photographer before we met and she decided to join me. Unfortunately, she is now disabled, but her service dog takes good enough care of her that, with some advance planning, I can be gone for several days at a time. I now take a satellite phone when I go backpacking (need to get a new one), but if I am away from my camera or the mountains for too long, she gets on me about getting back out there. In reality, it is the service dog that keeps us on an even keel. Between my wife and her service dog, I feel extremely lucky. I have no idea where I would be without either one of them.

Thank you very much for your condolences, but I was not intending to take the discussion off track. I was simply explaining why I do not currently have anything to share. We were very fortunate in that we had good insurance (nearly one third of the people in the mountains had none) and a rental that had gone vacant just a few weeks before. I am currently working on setting up the rental to what we really want. We are, finally, almost finished with our personal property lists for the insurance company. Then there is the class action suit against PG&E (it was their wires that started the fire). If my health holds up, I expect it will be at least another year or two before I can get back into my own darkroom. If it does not, I have already had over sixty years of fun. Now back to the discussion.

Apaflo: The opinion of any group of any size, by its very nature, has to be the sum of the opinions of the individuals contained within that group (it is not necessary that they all be in agreement). If we accept your insistence that "great art" is defined by the opinion of some significant group of people (a point I do not dispute), you make that an impossible goal to reach by your insistence that the opinion of an individual does not count. If you discount all of the individual opinions, there is then nothing left from which the group opinion can be derived.

minniev: I am sorry to report that, for the last ten months or so, my trips outside have been for many things, but none for photographic purposes (other than documentation for the insurance company). Last fall, my wife and I lost essentially everything except her service dog, her cats, my clarinets, my Nikon D7000, and our laptops to the second largest forest fire in California's recorded history. Digital photography is nice and I see it as an interesting aside, however, given my age I much prefer to work in the darkroom and I am starting that over at zero. When you have no evacuation warning and you look out to see the fire on your property, your first priority is lives. The rest is just "stuff" (including a house full of 150 to 200 year old antiques).

Apaflo: Whether we are talking about "art", "good" art, or "great" art your response is a diversion that does not address the fact that your logic is circular and meaningless. I think I'll go join St3v3M outside and do something useful.

Apaflo: your logic here leaves something to be desired. You say that something can be considered art if it is liked by a "significant number of people, from all walks of life". How many is a significant number?

At the same time you say that "the opinion of individuals" does not count. Just how do you propose to find a "significant number of people" agreeing on anything if the "opinion of individuals" does not count. It doesn't matter how big the number is that you multiply zero by, your answer is still going to be zero.

Your logic follows the same line as people who do not vote at an election because their vote "won't make any difference" and who then complain about the outcome of the election. It is a circular argument that makes no sense.

Ansel Adams was definitely not opposed to trying new developments (no pun intended) in photography. He was a major field tester for Polaroid materials and used them to great advantage. In teaching the zone system, he would set up his camera facing a blank wall and, using Polaroid materials, reproduce a perfect gray scale by simply changing exposure. He particularly liked Polaroid P/N materials because they not only gave him instant feedback, but they provided a negative that allowed him to apply his darkroom skill set as well. Unlike many who might have attempted various techniques to effect a Polaroid photo while it was developing, the only thing I ever saw him use was a watch with a sweep second hand. His skill with his camera was all that he needed. I never saw him "pull a roid" (a Brooks Institute term, not an Adams term) that I felt needed any adjustment, but he always managed to find something. I do not recall what the solution was that the P/N negatives needed to be soaked in to make them permanent, but he carried tanks of it in the back seat of his beloved Cadillac and, in his words, "splashed it all over the upholstery". I have no doubt that, given access to Photoshop, he would have taught himself enough coding to improve its capabilities in ways the rest of us have yet to imagine. However, back to Moonrise . . . . being familiar with his darkroom setup (in Carmel) and some of his techniques, I see no way that the before and after prints presented here could have been made from the same negative (even by him) unless the before print was intentionally printed in a way to take it to an opposite extreme. I believe the before print was made from his second exposure, taken after the sunlight had left the foreground area. I see things like the lack of shadows in the foreground sagebrush (?) and the minimal contrast between the crosses and their immediate surroundings to be in support of this opinion. I do not believe even he could so precisely dodge each individual cross to produce the result in the after print. In addition, the moon in the before print has a total lack of detail and a diffuse margin while in the after print it has clear detail and a clean margin. While these differences can easily be explained by a change in the lens setting to adjust for the loss of light, even for someone of his technical skill, they would be exceptionally difficult to create in the darkroom.

I feel very lucky to have learned the Zone System directly from Ansel Adams. He was very clear that he felt a print should include at least some (not necessarily very much) of both zones 1 and 10. He was somewhat less insistent about the gray scale between, though he indicated that it should be included in its entirety if at all possible. The "after" photo here has to be one of his later prints as he gradually reduced the mid-tones for dramatic effect. As a classically trained musician, one of the things he was fond of saying was "The negative is the score and the print is the performance". He did not attempt to make every print from a given negative identical, but to evolve his performance over time. For this image, my personal preference is for his earlier performances.

This is simply moving my first post from where I managed to post it in the wrong location to where I intended it to be.

I was fortunate enough to discuss "Moonrise" directly with Ansel Adams. I have no doubt that there was some darkroom manipulation, but I do doubt as much as being implied (what he did with one of my own negatives was nothing short of amazing). According to Ansel, he was driving when he saw the image. He pulled over and set up, but could not find his light meter, so he based the exposure on the luminosity of the moon (which he in fact knew). He took one exposure, pulled his film carrier, flipped it over, and reinserted it. By then the light had left the crosses. What is presented as the "before" image here impresses me more as a poorly printed copy of his second exposure. I do not believe he was making up a story.

Ansel Adams may have made many copies of Moonrise in the 1970's. However, in the 1960's, he considered his wealth to have been established by his shot of Half Dome. He considered that a bit ironic since it was taken on the last glass plate he was carrying on the climb that day and the photo that we know has the top cropped in order to hide the fact that the plate was damaged in a fire in his Yosemite studio.

Quote: Apaflo: Moonrise was his most popular print, and he produced roughly 1300 copies, most of them in the 1970's and it was that which brought wealth to Adams.
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I would have to disagree with parts of your statement. As a high school student in the very early 1960's, I was well aware of who Ansel Adams was as well as being familiar with a large portion of his work. During the 1960's he was making a very comfortable living off of his photography (by my standards, wealth). By 1968, he was living in a very large house, on a private road, on a cliff overlooking the ocean in Carmel, CA. His darkroom/workroom area was larger than my current living room and dining room combined. By then, his black Cadillac with the platform on top was getting quite old, but it was still kept in one of the garages. He had an underground, climate controlled negative vault in the back yard and thought nothing of paying $120 per month for electricity at a time when I (and most people I knew) considered anything over $35 to $40 per month to be excessive. A significant portion of his wealth clearly came before the 1970's.

Sorry . . . my first post here. I seem to have managed to put it on the page containing the link to this page. In any event, my discussion with Ansel about this photo was as I reported there.

I was fortunate enough to discuss "Moon Rise" directly with Ansel Adams. I have no doubt that there was some darkroom manipulation, but I do doubt as much as being implied (what he did with one of my own negatives was nothing short of amazing). According to Ansel, he was driving when he saw the image. He pulled over and set up, but could not find his light meter, so he based the exposure on the luminosity of the moon (which he in fact knew). He took one exposure, pulled his film carrier, flipped it over, and reinserted it. By then the light had left the crosses. What is presented as the "before" image here impresses me more as a poorly printed copy of his second exposure. I do not believe he was making up a story.