heard something he didn't like?

Eeeeeh. Quite a successful day off on several counts. Not on remembering to post the things I should have posted on Tuesday though. People are advised to go and see Lars and the Real Girl if they have a spare couple of hours and I shall add my recommendation to the existing ones recommending people go and see the Ansel Adams exhibition at the City Art Centre - interesting and skilful prints (plus the chance to play guess-the-age-of-the-silver-gelatin-print by that strange blackness thing old silver gelatin prints exhibit) and some interesting pictures (including some surprising ones which jump out as extremely different from the technically-good but maybe-a-little-too-detailed landscapeystuff) and some lovely pictures of misty trees which work much better than the snowy rocks which seem to be the most prized pictures.

I only heard of the bloke by name when I started researching camera-purchases and chanced upon Ken Rockwell's frequent reference to Adams and the zone system and localised contrast/exposure adjustments and so on. Our eyes may see things at more than one exposure level at a time but we also only see one tiny portion of our field of view in any great detail at any one time (the rest getting painted in from memory and extrapolated) so it's sometimes a little odd looking at an image consisting entirely of tiny details so contrasty that it looks three-dimensional yet entirely unreal (apart from the misty trees which probably work a little better as they're a more anticipatable shape than the surface of a lichen-covered rock). I shall definitely be popping back as there's no time to see all the stuff properly in one sweep but it has more to teach about exposure than landscape photography as such. I might have left it too late to be able to see it at a quiet time - the Royal Mile was covered in stalls this afternoon (possibly just for the easter holidays but they could now be there for the next five months until the end of the festival) and the number of crowds of people wandering about in matching padded anoraks has increased remarkably even since the weekend.