182182 PART 4 HOW DIGITAL PRINT-MAKING WORKS
ANSELAdams’ fame rose from his photographs that captured the splendor of mountains, prairies,
forests, and rivers in the still-pristine western half of the United States. His photographs of the Tetons
and Yosemite, still best-sellers in posters and calendars, glow with what seems at times to be their
own light. It’s hard to look at Adams’ photos without experiencing an emotional rush born of a
purely aesthetic sense. And yet in his own approach to photography, Adams functions more as engi-
neer than artist. As he created photographs, the reality before his cameras was not as significant as
how he transformed that reality into a print he could hold in his hands.In addition to creating the Zone system—covered in Chapter 5—to take guesswork out of exposures,
Adams just as carefully formulated specific, predictable methods for creating prints. He would labor
for hours in the darkroom on a single photo, and he was reported to say that he would be pleased if
he produced but 12 good prints a year.Although printing digital photographs with an ink-jet or dye-sublimation printer is a dog-leg depar-
ture in technology from Adams’ own methods. I suspect he would have been a fan of photo editing
software and the new machines for turning out photographs. Both provide the engineering controls
needed to improve on the original photo and to achieve consistent results.This is going out on a limb when you write about someone who is undisputed master in his field, but
I wouldn’t be surprised if today’s ink-jet and dye-sub printers didn’t fool Adams completely in their
disguise as “real” photographs. The first color ink-jet printers produced graphics in which the dot
matrices of color were painfully obvious. Hard copy coming out of photo printers today is free of
those dots, produces color as faithfully as traditional methods, promises not to fade or change color
for a century, and doesn’t reek of darkroom chemicals.You don’t take a photograph, you make it.
Ansel Adams