Ansel Easton Adams was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. He helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating “pure” photography which favored sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph.

  He was best known for his ultra-sharp landscapes, which he achieved through the use of a 4×5 view camera. The view camera allowed Adams to adjust the film plane and the lens plane so he could control the depth of field and the size relationships of objects in the frame with tilt and rise and fall movements.

Adams’s professional life was dedicated to capturing through his lens the forgotten and unspoiled wilderness of America’s national parks and other protected conservation areas in the West. He was a committed environmentalist and nothing short of an icon for the 20th century conservation movement.

analysing one his photographs;

Technical- the lighting in this image is natural as its been taken of a natural landscape in the open. You can straight away see that Ansels control over how much light he lets in is good as its what makes his images so different from other photographers- due to the range of different tones. His tonal range goes all he way from 0-9 which not many photographers can achieve in every image.

Visual- The photo was taken in black and white ( as well as all his other photographs) this helps in seeing the difference between all the different tones. His tone palette is done very successfully as you can clearly see the white shades along the river and the completely black tones on the trees and the mountains. This makes the contrast significantly sharp across the whole image. The image has been taken from a very far point of view in order to be able to capture the whole view however its taken from a straight on point of view which makes the viewer think they’re looking directly at the river and mountains.

Contextual- In 1941, at the height of World War II but before the bombing on Pearl Harbor, Adams received a commission from the U.S. Department of the Interior to photograph National Parks and other notable landscapes. In exchange for film, paper, and darkroom chemicals, and a day rate of $20, Adams would provide photographic murals for display in the halls of the Department of Interior. Although Adams took some 225 photographs for the project (including this image), the project was later dropped (never to be resumed) due to America’s sudden involvement in the war.

Conceptual- I don’t think there’s a big meaning behind this image other than Ansel wanting people to see this insane view in a more different way , such as over exaggerating and romanticizing all the different tones he captured in his images.

Landscape photography requires thorough planning before a shoot, for example you must think about the location of the photo-shoot, the weather you want to capture in your image, including the type of natural lighting, the camera settings needed for these conditions and the viewpoint of the images. This style of photography aims to amplify the essence of natural or urban features for the viewer.

Landscape photography that showcases a rural setting often displays recurring features such as fields, lakes and woodland areas within the countryside, focusing on natural forms rather than man made ones. Below are influential examples of this type of photography.

Adams  was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. He has been a visionary in his efforts to preserve this country’s wild and scenic areas, both on film and on Earth. Drawn to the beauty of nature’s monuments, he is regarded by environmentalists as a monument himself, and by photographers as a national institution. People say he was the most important landscape photographer of the 20th century, most widely known and beloved photographer in the history of the United States. The popularity of his work has only increased since his death. Adams’s most important work was devoted to what was or appeared to be the country’s remaining fragments of untouched wilderness, in national parks and areas of the American West.

This acute attention to the specifics of the physical world was also the root of his intense appreciation of the landscape in microcosm (a community, place, or situation regarded as encapsulating in miniature the characteristics of something much larger). His work expresses a remarkable variety of response, ranging from childish wonder, to languorous pleasure, to the biblical excitement of nature in storm, to the recognition of a stern and strict natural world.

Adams’ images have incredible texture, depth, layers, shadows, shapes, patterns and lines, mostly created by the use of grey-scale tones to create height and definition. All of his images were taken in natural sunlight and have a variety of highlights and shadows. In his images there is a heavy amount of contrast between the light and dark tones.

Adams preferred his photographs in black and white, he felt colour could be distracting, and could therefore divert an artist’s attention from the achievement of his full potential when taking a photograph, Adams said “I believe that a black and white photograph has a certain quality that colour will never have. By stripping the photograph of colour, your strip away distraction to the eye, and get down to the crux of the story, or uncover a secret moment that colours may have tinted too fiercely.”

In almost every photograph Adams took, he involved every tone from pasty white to the deepest black. Our eyes are drawn to areas that are bright, or areas that are sharply in focus, both forms of contrast represented in Adams’ photography. Our eyes use low level information to locate areas of interest. Adams accentuated the areas of light, pulling the eye’s attention to them. However, he creates areas of large contrast by increasing clarity and sharpness, which guides the eye in certain directions. He does this to get the eye to enter the frame at a certain point and then land on key areas.