Alan Ross | Alan Ross Photography

Ansel Adams’ Yosemite Special Edition Photographs

Jun 4, 2012Alan1 CommentAnsel AdamsAlan Ross, Ansel Adams, Ansel Adams Gallery, darkroom printing, silver-gelatin prints, Yosemite Special Edition Prints

Affordable Authentic Ansel Adams Prints One of Ansel Adams’ personal commitments was to share his energy and abilities in support of the things he believed in, most notably, photography and the environment. In the cause of both, Ansel and his wife, Virginia, selected six photographs of Yosemite and offered them for sale through her family…

Can the Zone System Go Digital?

Feb 21, 2012Alan1 CommentTech, Zone System and MeteringAlan Ross, Ansel Adams, Black and White Photography, Digital Photography, Fred Archer, Photography, The Zone System, Zone System

In a word: YES! The Zone System (ZS) can be an integral and important part of any digital photographer’s workflow because it allows you to plan and predict an image’s tonal values rather than letting the camera make the decision. The computerized metering systems in modern cameras are really amazing, and a lot of the…

Ansel Adams, Leica, and Yosemite in April 2012

Feb 9, 2012AlanAnsel Adams, NewsAlan Ross, Ansel Adams, Leica, Leica S2, Photography, Photography Blog, Yosemite

News Flash: Experience the Leica S2 in Yosemite! Students attending my April Ansel Adams Gallery workshop, “Ansel Adams’ Yosemite: The Art of Seeing,” will have a rare opportunity to photograph with the Leica S2, a premier medium-format digital camera that retails for approximately $28,000 and was developed exclusively for digital photography. It’s based on a…

Special Print Offering

Jan 25, 2012AlanAnnouncementAlan Ross, Alaska, Ansel Adams, Badwater, Black White Photography, Death Valley, Glacier Bay, Photography, Photography Blog

While I’m not much into New Year’s resolutions, I’m giving myself a goal to get into the darkroom more this year, and I’ve been doing some digging around in my files of as-yet unprinted images. And there are quite a few! The digital age has allowed me to experiment with images of interest and I’m…

Using a Cut-Out Card to Refine Photo Composition

Jan 22, 2012Alan2 CommentsPhoto PhilosophyAlan Ross, Ansel Adams, Photo Composition, Photograph, Photography, Viewing Card

One of the most challenging things in creating a strong image in photography is the need to find order in chaos. In the urban jungle there are wires, poles, signs, traffic and the like. In the natural world there are rocks, bushes, branches and landforms all contributing to visual mayhem. In an earlier writing I…

Choosing a Lens – How Does Focal Length Affect Your Image?

Jan 12, 2012Alan1 CommentLensesAlan Ross, Ansel Adams, Choosing a Lens, Focal Length, Photography

It comes as quite a surprise to a lot of the photographers I work with that the only thing that changes when you use a different focal-length lens is the cropping of your image! Optical aberrations aside, short focal-length, or “wide-angle,” lenses do not distort close subjects, and long focal-length, or telephoto, lenses do not…

Would Ansel Adams Shoot Digital?

Dec 30, 2011Alan2 CommentsAnsel AdamsAlan Ross, Ansel Adams, Ansel Adams Digital, Ansel Adams HDR

There has been a lot of talk on the Internet lately about whether Ansel Adams would have embraced digital photography if he were alive today. From what I can tell, most everyone seems to think that he would be enjoying both “shooting digital” and HDR. Having been his full time photo assistant in Carmel from…

Too Close to Home – Even for Ansel Adams

Dec 6, 2011Alan4 CommentsAnsel Adams, Photo PhilosophyAlan Ross, Ansel Adams, Golden Gate Bridge Photo, Photography

Removing Artists’ Block When I first moved to Carmel to work with Ansel Adams in 1974, I made several significant images within the first month or two. Then for the next five years pretty close to nothing. After I moved to San Francisco in 1979 to open my own studio, I got an assignment…

Selective Masking for Printing Challenging Negatives

Aug 24, 2010Alan1 CommentDarkroom, TechAlan Ross, Darkroom, Masking, Photography, Printing Negatives, Selective Masking

Get Total Consistency from Print to Print Over the years I’ve evolved a technique I have come to refer to as Selective Masking. I use the term “selective” because it is a physical, hands-on method of tonal control in analog printing, rather that the photometric “unsharp masking”. In its basic form, it’s not techno-anything; it…