Biography:
Ansel Adams was born on the 20th of February 1902 and died April 1984. He was born in San Francisco, California and his life’s work was based on being a photographer and an environmentalist. He focused his photography on black and white landscape photographer of the American west where he especially photographed the Yosemite National Park. During Adams life time he and Fred Archer developed the zone system which was a technique in photography to determine proper exposure and adjust the contrast of the final print. The resulting clarity and depth characterized his photographs to being inspirations of today’s photography. He mainly used large format cameras because that had a high resolution which helped to ensure sharpness in his image.
The very nature of romanticism in his images is rather unpredictable and uncontrollable. At other times quiet a sensual power manifests into beautiful and stunning photographs. Sometimes his images feature humans and animals while at other times the landscapes will be empty and bare of any form of life. The most notable feature in a landscape image of romantic quality is that it will stir the emotion and feelings and cause inspiration of imagination.
It is very noticeable in Adams work that there is a sentimental feeling to his work which cleverly portrays romanticism. He does this through the use of soft lighting as well as photographing beautiful landscape which makes anyone looking at the image feel some like of emotion to it. Looking at his work it is clear through the difference in landscapes that there is a current theme running through his work, not only are the photographs in black and white but he captures images almost in the perfect angle or position creating beautiful composition which shows the true beauty of landscapes.
Analysis
There is a definite beauty within all of Adams images however this image is the one that i have the strongest emotional response to. i think this is due to the remarkable tonal range which gives the image a sense of drama but then the soft light grey tones of the curved river running through the image brings calmness to the image and makes the photo so interesting to look at. Adams image are not famous and world known because he managed to capture a good image it is because of the effort and determination he had to create pieces of art which captured what he could see with his minds eye. The way the image has tones from bright white to nearly compleatly black and almost every tone in between is due to his skill and understanding which makes the images so life like and truely make his work some of the best romanticism images there has ever been. the winding river takes your eyes through the image on a journey and makes you look at every aspect of the image. the rest of the bottom half of the image which is darker than the river acts as a frame, how nature frames natural elements.
Experimenting with lighting, Contrast and the Zone System
I used a white infinity background and the pieces of paper to try and make a landscaped image that i could practice trying to include every zone in the system to make the image have good contrast. in the images i used natural light coming from a window from the right of the paper. I think that the images were successful and i managed to include quite a lot of the zones
