My response to Ansel Adams photography. The comparison of the depth of field in my image is similar as the foreground of the rocks, middle ground of the clouds/sea and the mountains in the background. The light from the sky shinning on the foreground of the image contrasts the background which is dark and gloomy. Using the low angle makes the mountains seem so much bigger than the small rocks.

This shows the comparison of the two images and how the foreground midground and background are the same. The rocks at the front of the image creates depth field in the image.

Exposure bracketing is a technique where, instead of taking a single photo, you take three (or more) that are all exposed slightly differently; normally one is correctly exposed, one slightly underexposed, and one slightly overexposed. It’s in quite a few situations, so let’s look at how it works.

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We experimented with the exposure bracketing inside the school, testing the different settings on the camera. Trying light and dark images by playing with the exposure, but changing the numbers on the ‘M’ setting. Changing the numbers lower e.g -2 the darker the image will be, if the image was +2 it would make the image over exposed.

There, you’ll be able to adjust the exposure compensation, as well as the bracketed shots. In the image above, I have my camera set up to take one underexposed shot, one overexposed shot, and one shot as metered. Depending on your camera, there may also be additional options to set what order the shots are taken and whether there are three, five, or even seven frames.

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.

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.

“You don’t improve nature. You reveal your impression of nature or natures impact on you.”

In this image Ansel uses the refilter to create a focal point of the rock. The dark sky highlights the snow at the bottom of the image creating contrast in colour. The leading lines in the image go from the bottom of the image to the top, following the lines of the rocks. The grey, black and white tones in the image create an ominous feel, of the mountain towering over him. Using a long shutter speed means that he is able to capture all the light in the image, meaning everything is in focus.

Though Ansel initially made an exposure using a yellow filter, he immediately swapped that for a dark red filter, which darkened the sky and produced the deep shadows and bright light we recognize in the final image. In landscape photography, a red filter will turn a blue sky almost black and make clouds really stand out, giving the scene a dramatic feel. They’re also excellent for increasing visibility in haze and fog.

John Constable RA was an English landscape painter in the Romantic tradition. Born in Suffolk, he is known principally for revolutionising the genre of landscape painting with his pictures of Dedham. Constable is famous for his landscapes, which are mostly of the Suffolk countryside, where he was born and lived. He made many open-air sketches, using these as a basis for his large exhibition paintings, which were worked up in the studio. His early style has many qualities associated with his mature work, including a freshness of light, colour and touch, and reveals the compositional influence of the old masters he had studied, notably of Claude Lorrain. Constable’s usual subjects, scenes of ordinary daily life, were unfashionable in an age that looked for more romantic visions of wild landscapes and ruins.

Landscape Photography

Landscape photography shows the spaces within the world, sometimes vast and unending, but other times microscopic. Landscape photographs typically capture the presence of nature but can also focus on man-made features or disturbances of landscapes. Landscape photography is done for a variety of reasons. Shooting landscapes forces you to get outside and find the beauty around you. Sometimes this means discovering places right in front of your eyes that you just never noticed were beautiful before. Other times this means exploring new places and getting out on a hike or nature walk.

Geopark

What is romanticism in photography?

According to the article titled “Romanticism and Its Relation to Landscape Photography & Painting”, romanticism was an art form that rejected classicalism and focused on nature, imagination and emotion. Therefore, this started a new way of thinking and created a new type of art.

History of Romanticism

Romanticism started in Western Europe, around the middle of the 18th century. At this time, the dominant artistic and cultural movement is Neoclassicism, which finds its inspiration in the aesthetics of ancient civilizations. Neoclassicism values order, self-control, and the promotion of ideal values.

Romanticism, first defined as an aesthetic in literary criticism around 1800, gained momentum as an artistic movement in France and Britain in the early decades of the nineteenth century and flourished until mid-century. With its emphasis on the imagination and emotion, Romanticism emerged as a response to the disillusionment with the Enlightenment values of reason and order in the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789.

The five elements of romanticism

1. Interest in the common man and childhood.
2. Strong senses, emotions, and feelings.
3. Awe of nature.
4. Celebration of the individual.
5. Importance of imagination.

Artist references for Romanticism

Roger Fenton was a British photographer, noted as one of the first war photographers. Fenton was born into a Lancashire merchant family. Roger Fenton is a towering figure in the history of photography, the most celebrated and influential photographer in England during the medium’s “golden age” of the 1850s. Before taking up the camera, he studied law in London and painting in Paris. Fenton remained consistent in his love of the British landscape and the history it enfolded. Each summer he photographed in locations revered for their ruined abbeys, cathedrals, castles, romantic associations and literary connotations. 

JMW Turner

Joseph Mallord William Turner RA, known in his time as William Turner, was an English Romantic painter, printmaker and watercolourist. He is known for his expressive colouring, imaginative landscapes and turbulent, often violent marine paintings. He dominated British landscape painting in a thoroughly Romantic style which was driven by the immediacy of personal experience, emotion, and the boundless power of imagination.

What is Sublime in photography?

The Sublime is a western aesthetic concept of ‘the exalted’ of ‘beauty that is grand and dangerous’. The Sublime refers to the wild, unbounded grandeur of nature. The Sublime is related to threat and agony, to spaces where calamities happen or things run beyond human control.

The sublime has long been understood to mean a quality of greatness or grandeur that inspires awe and wonder. From the seventeenth century onwards the concept and the emotions it inspires have been a source of inspiration for artists and writers, particularly in relation to the natural landscape.

Romantic artists would often use their experiences of nature or natural events to convey the experience of the sublime. Kant’s countryman, Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings of mist, fog, and darkness sought to capture an experience of the infinite, creating an overwhelming sense of emptiness.

The Romantic sublime

Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry (1757) connected the sublime with experiences of awe, terror and danger. Burke saw nature as the most sublime object, capable of generating the strongest sensations in its beholders. This Romantic conception of the sublime proved influential for several generations of artists.

Albert Renger-Patzsch

German photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch was a pioneering figure in the New Objectivity movement, which sought to engage with the world as clearly and precisely as possible.
Rejecting the sentimentality and idealism of a previous generation, Neue Sachlichkeit emerged as a tendency in German art, architecture and literature in the 1920s. In 1928 Renger-Patzsch published The World is Beautiful, a collection of one hundred photographs whose rigorous sensitivity to form revealed patterns of beauty and order in the natural and man-made alike. Embodying a new, distinctly modern way of looking at the world, the book established Renger-Patzsch as one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century.

‘There must be an increase in the joy one takes in an object, and the photographer should be fully conscious of the splendid fidelity of reproduction made possible by his technique’,

 Karl Blossfeldt

Karl Blossfeldt was a German photographer and sculptor. He is best known for his close-up photographs of plants and living things, published in 1929 as Urformen der Kunst. He was inspired, as was his father, by nature and the ways in which plants grow. From 1890 to 1896 he traveled through Italy, Greece, and North Africa, working for Moritz Meurer, who theorized that natural forms were reproduced in art. From 1898 to 1930 Blossfeldt taught at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Berlin; during this time, he amassed an archive of thousands of photographs of plants that he used as models to teach his students.

“IF I GIVE SOMEONE A HORSETAIL HE WILL HAVE NO DIFFICULTY MAKING A PHOTOGRAPHIC ENLARGEMENT OF IT. ANYONE CAN DO THAT. BUT TO OBSERVE IT, TO NOTICE AND DISCOVER OLD FORMS, IS SOMETHING ONLY FEW ARE CAPABLE OF.”

Image Analysis

The tone in this photograph is dark with light grey tones. The image has many leading lines leading you onto many other parts of the photograph. The colours create a sombre, sad feeling to the image.