Beginning:

Landscape Photography started with mostly rural landscapes, featuring only nature and remote areas. Consisting of hills, fields, cliffs, natural weather, coastlines etc.

Photographers like Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham would go out and adventure the land with their team, looking for the best place to take a shot of the beautiful and natural planet we live on.

However, these were 1910’s – 1930’s times, and since then, the world has changed significantly. Bigger cities were built, more roads were built, humanity was becoming more advanced and Nature was slowly being driven out by Man. Places that would have been featured in photos like the ones above would have been harder to come across in the new world.

As humanity and the world was developing, so was photography. In 1975, photographers adapted to these changes by taking landscape photos of newer things in the modernised world such as buildings, houses, cities etc. This created a new genre in landscape photography, Urban/Industrial Landscape. And a new movement called New Topographics.

Urban/Industrial Landscape:

Urban Landscape is landscape photography, but with more man-made things involved in the picture frame. Photographers like Robert Adams and Stephen Shore were very well known for this type of work, here are some of the photos they produced under this genre:

This genre allowed photographers to bring life and beauty to the industrialised world, it could have been trying to tell us that even now, in a more polluted and artificial world, where most of the beautiful landscapes were slowly disappearing and being replaced by us. Nature is still present and will still maintain it’s beauty.

New Topographics:

The New Topographics was the idea and group made by William Jenkins in 1975. That featured taking mostly black and white pictures of the urban and man-made landscape. It included many photographers like Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Nicholas Nixon and William Jenkins himself. Who were inspired by the man-made stuff like car parks, suburban neighbourhoods and streets. They would go out and take pictures of those types of places.

Suburban Houses:

The New Topographics was also a reaction to the increasing of Suburban housing. When World War Two ended, people started coming home from the war. When they came home, millions of veterans started getting married and were starting families, causing a dramatic increase in America’s population. This caused lots of issues like Inflation and labour unrest. This era was called the Baby Boomer Generation. There was too many people so America had to build more housing, so they decided to build separate houses away from the cities in smaller and remote areas. They called these the Suburban areas and they consisted of the same house built over and over again. Repeated until they could fit everyone in.

The Photographers took advantage of this era by taking photos of these areas to show us how sad and depressing it most likely would have been.

Robert Adams: The New West

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I picked out these photos that I thought were best out of my photoshoot. I like them because I feel they best suited my standards. I also like their correlation to Ansel Adams’ work as the photos appear quite sharp and detailed, much like his work. They also feature very good contrast and overall feel very dramatic. I like the shading the clouds have in combination to the sun, it creates a warm and happy feeling.

Here you can see a photo painted in 1821 by John Constable, it depicts the rural scene of what appears to be a farmland. It is known as England’s most Famous Image and the Most Popular.

It also plays a part in Romanticism as this was painted during the Industrial Revolution. Meaning what is shown in this painting is slowly being shunned out by factories and buildings. Which is the point of Romanticism, to treasure the times pre Industrial Revolution and to battle it.

In the photo, we can see two people by the wagon, I assume the one wearing white is an adult and the other is a child. They are on a wagon being pulled by horses, next to them there is a cottage-like house and the other side, an empty field. We can also see what looks like a sheep dog, commonly used in farms. Which, given all of these details, it is indicated this is a farmland.

You can see no things like factories or machinery, no roads or cars and no cities. It all feels normal, it looks more like how the world should look and normal. Because of this, it feels peaceful and calm.

Who is Ansel Adams:

Ansel Adams was an American photographer and environmentalist. He was also considered by some to be one of the most influential photographers of the American West.

He was best known for his black and white landscape photos of the west and he also founded Group f/64 which was a famous group advocating “Pure Photography”. He was considered to be a “Pure Photographer” as his photos were very sharp and very detailed.

Some of the photos he made:

As you can see, his photos featured lots of detail in the scenery, nicely presented in a black and white finish, it captures the beauty of nature and life, which was one of the things he wanted to teach people. That nature and mankind can live together in harmony.

Beginning:

Ansel Adams was born in 1902 in San Francisco. When he was twelve years old, he got his hands on his first camera from a trip to Yosemite National Park. Since then, he has pursued his passion for photography and has come across many achievements such as being contracted with the United States Department of the Interior to take photos of national parks, being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, co-founding the magazine called Aperture and co-founding the Centre for Creative Photography at the Arizona University.

“The Face of Half Dome”:

“The Face of Half Dome” is one of Ansel’s most popular images, took in 1927 in California. It is in fact the first photo Ansel took that was influenced by his own vision. It is also the first photograph to feature the, yet to be named, Zone System. He took this photo with his Korona view camera, he also had different coloured filters and lenses and twelve panchromatic glass plates. When he first arrived to the dome, the time of day didn’t give the right light so he proceeded to wait for two hours for when the lighting would be just right.

However, by the time it was right, he only had two glass plates remaining, so he had to make sure he made the most of it and capture the absolute best shot he could get with the little he had left. The first attempt, he used a yellow filter and took the shot;

Ansel didn’t think it fitted his vision and ideas, he felt the contrast didn’t create a dramatic enough feeling, the sky was too bright and didn’t create enough sharpness or detail because of it.

Ansel realised that photographic emulsions are less sensitive to red light, so he decided to use a dark red filter to darken the background, he loaded it in and took his last shot;

This was the final photo taken, the red filter made the sky black and because of the darkness of the sky now, it created significantly more contrast between the black sky and the white snow. The red filter even made it so more tiny details in the rock formation could be seen too. Adams was very satisfied with this photo and he decided to publish it and name it “Monolith, the Face of Half Dome”. It was the first time Ansel could control the viewers experience of his photos. And this later refined and set the foundation for his future work later to come.

The Zone System:

As mentioned earlier, the Zone System is what Ansel would come to discover while making his work. The Zone System is a tool used to determine the exposure and light levels in Photography:

It was a tool used a lot by other Photographers who wanted to get more defining and dramatic photographs for their work. Each checkpoint in the system was named and described:

Adams quoted: ‘Not an invention of mine; it is a codification of the principles of sensitometry. Worked out at the art centre in Los Angeles’ This system and quote was made in 1939.

I travelled to the nearby places as said in my Photoshoot plan and took some really good looking photographs. Mostly featuring the sky, with the sun shining through the clouds which was a very nice touch. I took these photos and edited them in Adobe Lightroom. I edited them by tweaking the exposure, contrast and many other levels to do with lighting, I will only show the edited ones right now as I do not have the disk space to include both versions of each photo.

I really enjoyed editing these pictures, just as much as I did taking them. I think these photos were great and the lighting balance made them greater. My favourite detail seen in a handful of these is the sun rays shining through the clouds, if you look closely at most of the sky ones you will notice them too. I also like how the sun in some of these is very bright and everything else is very dark, which adds a lot of contrast and shadows which I really like and the clouds add so much more, it adds more detail by making the image feel more dramatic and more complex. I also like the perspectives of some of these, with the casual looking perspective that anyone could view the sky from. It makes what’s in the photos feel like a more normal occurrence for anyone to enjoy which I like. Most of these also contain elements in the foreground and background, the usual is things like bunkers and bars included in the foreground and usually the sun shining in the background, which makes the photos feel more alive and active as the inclusion of these elements makes you think there is other things happening at the time of the shot. Some photos that contain things like the clouds and the tall grass creates some visible texture, you can see the details and grittiness it adds to the photos which makes them so much better.

I will be going to various sites of interest in Jersey in order to take pictures that feature elements from Romanticism and the Sublime in the form of landscape photos.

Some places I will go to are:

10 – Le Pinacle, 5 – St. Ouen’s Bay, 8 – Le Grand Etacquerel, 7 – Le Petit Etacquerel, 9 – Le Pulec. All on Sunday 20th Nov in the Afternoon.

I will be mostly taking inspiration from Ansel Adams, known for wide landscape shots. I will try to experiment with the lighting, like darker shots, which I think will go very well with the rainy weather and harsh wind.

Some examples are:

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What is Romanticism:

Romanticism is the attitude or intellectual orientation that characterized many works of literature, painting, music, architecture, criticism, and historiography in Western civilization over a period from the late 18th to the mid-19th century.

It was started in 1757 during the Industrial Revolution, which is what Romanticism was supposed to be fighting against. The Industrial Revolution promoted the idea of Enlightenment, this was promoting the scientific progress of rationality and logical thinking. While as Romanticism more represented the idea of returning to nature through art such as poetry, paintings and later photography.

What is the Sublime:

Historically, the word “Sublime” evades the idea of easy definition and it revolves around many other things such as: “Judgement, feeling, state of mind and a kind of response to art or nature.” In other words, the Sublime is supposed to resemble the extraordinary and that if something that can “Compel and destroy”.

The Sublime was started in 1757 and it has been debated over what the word actually means since then. The original meaning made by the Sublimes founder, Edmund burke, was “an artistic effect productive of the strongest emotion the mind is capable of feeling.”.

Here are some edits I decided to make, I experimented with some of my photos by editing them in lots of different ways.

This one below is when I combined a few photos into one. Which I think turned out pretty interesting:

This one, I took three images and put them in three different columns:

I decided to make a 3D effect one, which I have done before so I was very familiar with it: