Keavey Henshaw
Unit Four Photography
Ansel Adams
“You don't take a photograph, you make it.”
Examples and Analysis
Ansel Adams born the 20th February 1902 in San Francisco, California was a photographer and environmentalist. He was born the son of Charles Hitchcock Adams, a businessman. 1927 was the pivotal year of Adams’s life. He made his first fully visualized photograph, Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, and took his first High Trip. Original photographs by Ansel Adams are defined as photographs printed by Ansel Adams from negatives he shot and developed. He had the ability to push modern phtography forward by exerimenting with over exposing different parts of his own images and then combining the different images to make one beautiful one. He also did this by using gradient filters to allow some parts of the image to be darker than others.Ansel Adams, went into the wilderness for months at a time. He became inspired by what was around him. He wanted to reflect his inspiration through his images and use his creativity. Many of the cameras he used to take the gorgeous images below were heavy, film cameras. For many years he would take long trips into the wildreness, with a donkey, 100 pounds of gear and food, and a 30 pound sack of photographic equipment. He lugged tri-pods, camera's, and portable darkrooms.
Adams liked to control the depth of field, by adjusting the film plane and the lens, with the relationships of objects in the frame, with tilt and rise and fall movements. Doing these things, he was able to alter the perspective to what he desired, controlling rise movements or increasing depth of field by making the lens standard tilt down.
Adams developed all his own film, using a small space in his parents home, and while in the field. He first used matte and changed to glossy paper to increase the tonal values. With Fred Archer, Adams developed the Zone System as a way to determine proper exposure and adjust the contrast of the final print. The resulting clarity and depth characterized his photographs.
As you can see the photo to the left has a very long debth of field. The amount of detail and precision could only be added by the made with the large-format cameras Adams used because of their high resolution which helped ensure sharpness in his images.
In 1927, Adams produced his first portfolio, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras, in his new style, which included his famous image Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, taken with his Korona view camera using glass plates and a dark red filter (to heighten the tonal contrasts). On that excursion, he had only one plate left and he "visualized" the effect of the blackened sky before risking the last shot.