Ansel Adams
Ansel Adams was an American photographer born in 1902, California, United States. He was a landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black and white images of the American West. Adams was a hopeless and rebellious student, so his father removed him from school at age 12. He then became interested in music and became a serious and ambitious musician who was considered to be a highly talented pianist by qualified judges (including Henry Cowell). In 1916 he received his first camera and proved to be an excellent photographer. In 1932 he helped found Group f/64 along with six other photographers who shared a common photographic style characterized by sharply focused and carefully framed images seen through a particularly Western viewpoint.
In 1940 Ansel Adams developed The Zone System along with Fred Archer. The Zone System is a system by which you understand and control every level of light and dark to your best advantage. It works in digital just as it does for sheet film. Having a system allows you to understand and be in control, instead of taking whatever you get.
Fay Godwin
Fay Godwin was a British photographer born in 1931, Belin, Germany. She was most known for her black and white landscape photographs of the British countryside and coast. In 1961 she married publisher Tony Godwin and together they had two kids. Fay Godwin’s interest in photography developed in the mid 60s as a result of taking pictures of her children. She was less active in her last years due to her health and in December 2004 she had her last interview with David Corfield for Practical Photography in which she blamed the NHS: “The NHS. They ruined my life by using some drugs with adverse affects that wrecked my heart. The result is that I haven’t the energy to walk very far.”
Eliot Porter
Eliot Porter was an American photographer born in in 1901, Illinois, United States. He is best knows for his colourful photographs of nature. Porter’s interest in nature was fostered by his family from a young age as he began photographing his family’s island property as a youth in Maine, before going on to study chemical engineering at Harvard University. After he graduated in the mid 30s, his brother (Fairfield Porter) encouraged his latent interest in photography and introduced him to Ansel Adams and Alfred Stieglitz.
