Yesterday, I bought Ansel Adams’ three-book set: The Camera, The Negative, The Print. They arrive Monday, and I’m treating that delivery like a line in the sand.
Not because I’m trying to recreate Adams’ landscapes, or pretend I live in a darkroom. I’m doing it because I want a foundation that doesn’t wobble every time the internet changes its mind about what “good” looks like. I want a process I can trust. A way of working that’s deliberate, repeatable, and built around intent instead of luck.
I’m going to read these slowly, ingest them, and translate them into a digital workflow that respects the original thinking without pretending film and RAW are the same thing. Then I’m going to share the journey in two places: here, as a series of serious posts, and on YouTube as companion videos where I actually apply what I’m learning in the real world.
This is also why I’m considering a new site structure: a Fundamentals category, with three sub-categories underneath it:
- The Camera
- The Negative
- The Print
Not as a history unit. As an operating system.
Because Adams’ approach is almost the opposite of how a lot of photography gets done today.
The modern temptation is to compress everything into the shutter moment. Get the “look” baked in-camera. Nail the vibe through a film simulation. Deliver it straight out of the camera and call it purity.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Sometimes it’s a creative choice. Sometimes it’s speed. Sometimes it’s the whole point.
But it also collapses the process. It merges what Adams treated as separate stages—negative and print—into one step. And in doing so, it quietly shifts the goal of capture from “record possibility” to “finalize decisions.”
Adams didn’t treat the shutter as the finish line. He treated it as the beginning.
In his framework, the exposure (the camera) creates a negative—an information-rich foundation designed to be interpreted later. The print is where the photograph becomes itself.
In 2026 terms, that maps cleanly onto how I want to work with digital:
- The RAW file is my digital negative
- Post-processing is my print phase
- The final export (web, book, or paper print) is the photograph people actually see
That’s the shift I’m committing to: when I press the shutter, my job is not to complete the photograph. My job is to capture a digital negative in a way that gives me the most options later.
Not “fix it in post.” Not “spray and pray.” Not lazy.
Intentional.
It means redefining what success looks like in the field. Success isn’t “this looks perfect on the back of the camera.” Success is “this file contains the tonal and colour information I need to interpret this without compromise.”
Modern cameras are incredible, but they also encourage shortcuts. They tempt us to finalize style too early, when we’re still standing in the scene, when our eyes are adjusting, when we’re rushed, when the weather sucks, when the moment is slipping away.
Adams’ separation of stages is a kind of discipline. It says: do the right work at the right time.
- The Camera is where you decide what matters and commit to the frame.
- The Negative is where you preserve possibility and protect the information you’ll need.
- The Print is where you express your voice—where you shape tone, contrast, and emphasis with intention.
That’s not “cheating.” That’s authorship.
And for me, as someone building bodies of work—projects meant to hang together—this matters. The print phase is where consistency is born. Not in a preset, but in repeated decisions: how bright the mids live, how deep the blacks sit, what you do with highlights, what your colour philosophy is, how you guide attention inside a frame.
That’s not a trick. That’s a voice.
So this is my plan. Starting Monday, I’ll begin a structured series: Fundamentals → The Camera, then The Negative, then The Print. Every few posts will have a related video, not as a recap, but as a working walk-through of how it changes what I do when I’m outside, actually making photographs.
I’m going the other direction from the trend. I’m slowing down. I’m separating the steps again. I’m choosing a workflow where the shutter click is the start, where my goal is to bring home the richest negative I can, so the print can become what I saw before I ever raised the camera to my eye.