Ansel Adams was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his Black And White images of the American West. Adams helped found the anti-pictorialist Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating “pure” photography that favoured sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph.

Adams was a life-long advocate for environmental conservation, and his photographic practice was deeply entwined with this advocacy. At age 12, he was given his first camera during his first visit to Yosemite national park. He developed his early photographic work as a member of the Sierra Club. He was later contracted with the U.S Department of the interior to make photographs of U.S. National Parks; his work and his persistent advocacy helped expand the National Park system.

Adams went to to these national parks and then used his camera with a colour filter to make the picture look more dramatic than it actually was. He knew that one day the national parks would become tampered with and impure so he wanted to preserve the memory that he had, and what he saw at the time.

Here are some of his images:

He used his camera to place himself in areas where there is a large amount of action in the scene, he also had very little open sky showing in them and this meant that all the focus was on the trees, the mountains and the lakes.

He believed alot in the style of strait photography, this is that he used a very high f stop. The reason that he did this is because he believes that having a low f stop isn’t the way that we see the world and that having a low f stop is hiding the true reality. As I said earlier he was part of a group called f/64 they were a group of people who believed in taking photos with a high aperture.