Robert Adams is an American photographer who has focused on the changing landscape of the American West. His work first came to prominence in the mid-1970s through his book The New West and his participation in the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape in 1975. Robert Hickman Adams was born on May 8, 1937 in Orange, New Jersey.

In 1963, Adams bought a 35milimeter reflex camera and started to photograph mostly architecture and nature. He joined classes at Colorado Springs Fine Art Center and studied about photography techniques by a professional, Myron Wood.

In 1964, Adams began photographing and after three years he started teaching it to others, however only part-time so that he could invest the rest of the hours in his projects.

In 1969, four prints by Robert Adams were bought by Museum of Modern Art. A year later, he put all his time and effort in photography.

In 1973, he became an associate at John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He was awarded the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1994.

Adams has worked on American West landscapes for more than 38 years, covering Oregon, Colorado and California. He uses his camera to express his love for landscapes. Also, to understand how industrial and urban growth has transformed it.

Adam’s work and his style gained inspiration from photographers like, William Henry Jackson, Lewis Hine, Dorothea Lange, Timothy O’Sullivan, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and Carleton Watkins.

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

The image of the mountain was one of the influential landscape photograph that started landscape photography taken by Ansel Adams. The other black and white landscape photograph was taken by Ernest H. Brooks.

The use of different lenses created a nice contrast between the shadows and the light in both the black and white photographs to highlight the important things in these photographs: for example it highlights the seal in the water.

landscape photography shows spaces within the world. they typically capture the presence of nature but can also focus on man -made features or disturbances of landscapes.

romanticism is an artistic and intellectual movement that originated in Europe in the late 1700’s and categorized by heightened interest in nature, emphasis on the individual’s expression of emotion and imagination departure from the attitudes and forms of classicism, and rebellion against established social rules. It would often be shown in either art pieces or poetry at the time but eventually it evolved into other things like photography.

romanticism has long since been associated with landscape. In photography, the sense of romance and landscape features its prospering spirit. While difficult to categorize, it is uncontrollable and unpredictable because its mostly all about nature.