Ansel Adams became a well know photographer of the American West, particularly Yosemite National Park, using his work to promote conservation of wilderness areas. At age 12, he was given his first camera during his first visit to Yosemite National Park. His iconic black-and-white images helped to establish photography among the fine arts. His photography favored sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph.

Between 1929 and 1942, Adams’s work matured, and he became more established. The 1930s were a particularly experimental and productive time for him. He expanded the technical range of his works, emphasizing detailed close-ups as well as large forms, from mountains to factories.

He and Fred Archer developed an exacting system of image-making called the Zone System, a method of achieving a desired final print through a deeply technical understanding of how tonal range is recorded and developed in exposure, negative development, and printing. The resulting clarity and depth of such images characterized his photography. This is how he achieved his dramatic photographic effects.

The zone system is a technique which allows photographers to translate light into specific densities and negatives which gives the photographer much more control over the look of their final product. Adams gained exposure by touring with his photographic works, giving seminars and publishing books.

Keld Helmer-Petersen was a Danish photographer who achieved widespread international recognition in the 1940’s and 1950’s for his abstract colour photographs.  He is internationally acclaimed for his images of structures, patterns and details found in industrial areas, city scapes and nature.

He established himself as a photographer of architecture and design. Simultaneously, his artistic work shifted towards the more abstract, as he found inspiration in German and American photography as well as international abstract art.

“A strong leaning towards extreme simplicity and graphic clarity in carefully composed compositions, often silhouetted, but more often than not containing subtle greys in contrast to pure black and white.”

Helmer-Petersen was born and grew up in the Østerbro quarter of Copenhagen. He started taking photographs in 1938, when he received a Leica camera as a graduation present. At an early stage, he became aware of the trends in international photography; in the 1940s he subscribed to the US Camera Annual and in this period became familiar with German inter-war photography, which had developed at the Bauhaus and in the Neue Sachlichkeit (The New Objectivity) movement.

The international prospect and an interest in contemporary art and architecture contributed to the fact that at the age of 23, Helmer-Petersen, as one of the first Danish photographers, began to work with an abstract formal language.

Architecture and design played a great role in Helmer-Petersen’s work, both professionally and as an artistic field of interest. From 1952 to 1956, he worked with photographer Erik Hansen, after which he established his own studio specializing in architecture and design photography, in 1956. In the decades that followed, he worked as a photographer for his generation of architects and designers.

Helmer-Petersen is primarily self- taught in photography but studied at the Institute of Design in Chicago in 1950-51

Since 1955 the photographer has run his own studio, specializing in architecture, design and industrial photography. He has also taught photography at the Royal Academy of Art, Copenhagen, since 1964, and at the Department of Art History, University of Lund, Sweden (1978-79). In the 1950s Helmer-Petersen lectured at several schools of design, graphic art, and arts and crafts in Copenhagen.

Awards he won

• 1981: Thorvald Bindesbøll Medaljen
• 1996: Nationalbankens Jubilæumsfonds Hæderslegat
• 2005: Fogtdal Photographers Award, Denmark
• 2011: Forening for Boghåndværks Hæderspris

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When out taking photographs for my landscape shoots, I tried out exposure bracketing, which is when you change the exposure. This means that you have a selection of photographs, of the same subject, at different exposures, going from over exposed to under exposed. Using exposure bracketing means that you can merge them together, on Photoshop, to create a highly detailed and impressive image, that you would not be able to create with a single shot.

hdr image one

These are the images I used to create this merged image.

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I feel this image, that was produced, was the best, as it has the full range of tones, and was exactly how I pictured it to be when i took the photographs.

hdr image two

Here are the images that I merged together to create this image.

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I don’t think this turned out as well as the first, and this is purely down to the fact that the images the I took to make this HDR image, are not the greatest and are lacking interest and colour. This means that the image produced, is not going to have a full range of colours.

hdr image three

Here are the images that I merged together to create the image above.

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I think this image, that was produced, could be improved, meaning when I take my next of images, I need to quick in taking the photographs, at different exposures, because then the clouds won’t move as much, and the light will not change dramatically either. If I did this next time, then I think the strange orange space will disappear.

Overall, I would definitely do HDR imagery again, using exposure bracketing, because you get some very interesting and intense photographs produced.