Museum Pieces

I shot FP4 and HP5+ in my Leica IIIa during our trip to Phoenix.  One of the mornings was spent at the Phoenix Art Museum where there was an exhibit of classic race cars.  The exhibit space was pretty dim, but the HP5+ coped well with that while still retaining a good range of tones.  The 35mm Jupiter 12 lens provided enough depth of focus to let me make all the shots wide open at 1/40.

In the upstairs photo gallery there was an Ansel Adams exhibit.  The point of the exhibit was a demonstration of how Adams created differing versions of images from the same negatives by cropping, dodging and burning.  That is not surprising for photographers, but I think it was probably instructive for people not familiar with photo processing techniques.  The most dramatic example of Adams' skill was his famous Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico print which looked very bland before he darkened the sky and burned in the details of the clouds.
    It seems there is always at least one big mistake in the captions that accompany any large exhibit like this Adams show.  In this case it involved a portrait of Alfred Stieglitz made by Adams in the late 1930s.  The caption correctly stated that Adams made the picture with a Contax I 35mm rangefinder, but then asserted that the image which was about 8x10 was a contact print!

Stieglitz by Adams

Adams by Weston