Ansel Adams was born February 20th 1902 in California, Adams is one of America’s most famous photographers and is known for his stunning photos of the American wilderness and his passion for conservation. Ansel Adams’ photography puts the American wilderness on display, highlighting its enormity and beauty through dramatic black and white photos.

Adams’ knowledge of cameras and the science behind them allowed him to visualise his photos before he took them.

Ansel Adams joined the Sierra Club in 1919, an environmental group established to preserve the natural wilderness of the Yosemite Sierra. He spent as much time as he could in the Yosemite Sierra. In years to come, he even became the keeper of the club’s LeConte Memorial Lodge. During the group’s hikes and camping trips, Ansel Adams was able to soak up the sublime wonder of the landscape. It was then that he began his career as a pioneering American photographer. Adams published his first photographs in the club’s 1922 bulletin, and held his first one-man exhibition at the club’s San Francisco headquarters in 1928. In 1934, he became a member of the Sierra club’s board of directors.

This is one of Adams most famous pieces of work it is called “the face of half dome” it was taken in a national park in1927, taken during a treacherous journey through Yosemite’s LeConte Gully trail with a small group of friends, the trip took

Adams techniques.

One of the key compositional techniques that Adams employed in many of his images was to place the horizon about two-thirds of the way up the frame. This would mean the composition was biased in favour of the landscape rather than the sky and would help to communicate the epic scale of the scene. 

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 This was originally made to determine his vision for tones within a picture it also links to the exposure settings of a camera.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. 

Ansel Adams made photos as he visualised the photos before he took them and manipulated them to make the photos look how he visualised them. That why he said i made/created photos instead of taking photos. Adams wrote wrote 10 technical manuals on photography which helped him become famous for his style and making it a world famous style of photography.

Ansel Adams used a large format camera to take his photos, he also used filters to add dimension, depth and drama to his work whilst using black and white film. Adams used a red filter in some of his most famous work as he found that it added the most dramatic effect, but will often ruin the cloud pattern, yellow has the least dramatic effect on the sky and photos and then their is orange which is in the middle it gives a dramatic feel to the photo but without darkening it too much. The darker the filter the harder it is ti let light into the camera, so there for the image will be darker.