Ansel Adams was an American landscape photographer. Who is most known for his timeless photograph of the ‘Face of Half Dome’. His extensive knowledge of cameras and the science behind how they worked allowed him to visualise the image before he had even taken it.

Ansel became frustrated when an image would not get developed how he visualized it, therefore, he created the ‘zone system’. This was originally made to determine his vision for tones within a picture it also links to the exposure settings of a camera. The 11 zones in Ansel Adams’ system were defined to represent the gradation of all the different tonal values you would see in a black and white print, with zone 5 being middle grey, zone 0 being pure black (with no detail), and zone 10 being pure white (with no detail).  Theoretically, each zone represents one f-stop in exposure. 

Face Of Half Dome

The story behind the Face Of Half Dome:

On April 10th 1927, Ansel and his four friends set out to go on a hike to photograph this soon to be iconic cliff edge. However, this was not his fist time going to the Half Dome. Ansel had spent four of his teenage summers in the area, and the first time that he photographed it he was fourteen years old.

In order to achieve the dark background Ansel was experimenting with different coloured filters where he was using a yellow filter, however, almost immediately switched to a dark red filer which darkened the sky and added depth into the shadows of the mountain.

He has also created the perfect exposure. The Time element is about shutter speeds which is the duration of time the shutter is open for, therefore how long the film, plate or sensor is exposed to light.

photo literacy:

Ansel Adams is considered to be one of the most famous landscape photographers of all time, above is a photo taken which is a perfect example to use with his zone theory, the trees would be a 0 and the river would be a 0.

Shooting in daylight, into the light shown by the silhouette of the trees most likely used a slow shutter in order to gain a sharp clear image.