‘You don’t take a photograph, you make it.’ – Ansel Adams
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 favoured sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph.
What is group f/64, and what does it mean?
Formed in 1932, Group f/64 was a San Francisco Bay Area-based informal association of 11 American photographers, including Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and Edward Weston. Like many postwar documentary photographers, this group of so-called ‘straight’ photographers focused on the clarity and sharp definition of the un-manipulated photographic image. Committed to a practice of “pure photography”, Group f/64 encouraged the use of a large-format view camera in order to produce grain-free, sharply-detailed, high value contrast photographs. The name of the group is taken from the smallest camera lens aperture possible—which yields the sharpest depth of field.
About Ansels photography:
Ansel’s pictures would never turn out how he imagined them to. This was due to exposure and tones, and that the pictures he took were in black and white. The camera ansel would use is a kodak A4 speed camera:
Ansel couldn’t take several photos at once instead he had to use glass plates each time he took a photo, this is why it was essential for him to be able to make sure that he wasn’t wasting any chances. To enable him to understand and estimate his outcomes for his pictures he created the ‘zone system’.
The zone system
The zone system was designed to provide a framework for determining exposure, ensuring that the photographer could create properly exposed images each and every time. Despite it being almost ninety years old, the zone system in photography is still relevant today, in both film and colour photography. it is a scale of eleven tone values. The darkest being pure black, the lightest being pure white. Black is Zone 0, white is Zone X. Each grey value between these two extremes is exactly one photographic stop different than the grey tone on either side of it.
