A mood board is a collection of images gathered together into collage form. People use it extensively in design and photography to help define the visual direction of a project. Sometimes you may want to create a physical board from magazines and other print media. But these days mood boards are usually virtual.
My photoshoot for landscape romanticism and the sublime has me inspired to focus on doing coastline areas around Bouley Bay and also autumnal/ wintery settings in the lanes of jersey. I think these locations are good for this topic as they are very rural areas and show off the peacefulness of nature.
‘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.
Here you can see the difference in the background (sky). The left shows before Ansel changing the camera exposure and then the right showing pure black (zone 10). Clearly the right image looks more interesting with more sharp tones and definition. This is why it was important for Ansel to recognise how much exposure was having an effect on his photography.
Here are some pictures of the contact sheet of my second photoshoot I have done, of the sand dunes. This shows the process of me selecting and discarding images and rating them on a scale of green being some of my best images, and red being some of the more poor images that maybe aren’t as good.
Final images
These weren’t very exciting landscapes and as it was dark when I was photographing it, the colours also weren’t very bright. So, I decided to make my images black and white. I also think this makes the images appear more dramatic and have more of an impact than if they had dull colours.
Exposure bracketing is where the photographer take a selection of images using different exposure settings. Some of them will be over exposed and others will be under exposed It allows you to get the perfect images with the foreground and the background in focus. You can do this automatically or manually on a digital camera. To do this automatically you can select the AEB button on the camera which will take a selection of images for you with different exposures. It allows us to capture high contrasting images. To do it manually you can change the exposure settings as seen in the images below.
Adam Ansel was born in February 20, 1902 and died on April 22, 1984 when world war to came he was to old to fight but he’s known for his amazing photos and for his invention of the zone system. There are 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 and zone 10 being pure white.
He also received awards for his work such as the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the John Muir award, Guggenheim fellowship for creative arts, Sierra Club John Muir Award, and the Hasselblad award.
Group f/64 On November 15, 1932, at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, eleven photographers announced themselves as Group f/64: Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, John Paul Edwards, Preston Holder, Consuelo Kanaga, Alma Lavenson, Sonya Noskowiak, Henry Swift, Willard Van Dyke, Brett Weston, and Edward Weston
Ansel Adams set out on April 10th 1927 set out along Yosemite’s LeConte Gully to get a photo of the striking sheer face of Half Dome, one of Yosemite National Park’s most iconic natural features when Ansel Adams was 14 explored this area so he knew where he was going when went on this trip with his future wife and 3 other friends. he took this photo on what they call the diving board and he used a red filter to get the black sky even thought it was taken in the day.
John Constable was an English landscape who was Born in Suffolk, England he is known for revolutionising the genre of landscape “I should paint my own places best”, he wrote to his friend John Fisher in 1821, “painting is but another word for feeling”. Most of John Constables paintings were based around where he grew up” When I sit down to make a sketch from nature, the first thing I try to do is to forget that I have ever seen a picture”.
The painting depicts a rural scene on the River Stour between the English counties of Suffolk and Essex.
The image above is one of his most famous landscape paintings, where John presents a picture of farm life in the 18th century. Towards the left of the painting, The Building was owned by a Constable’s father and was later rented out by a farmer, which was said to have been born in the cottage and only spent a total of four days away from it. Constable’s father owned 90 acres of land surrounding this painting. John grew up in an upper class family who avoided struggle, This is not represented in his paintings as they include people from a working class background who got significantly less money than johns family. The painting “Haywain” alone shows a peaceful day compared to the crisis that was happening around them.
Ansel Adams was a very important photographer, who inspired a lot of photographers around the 1930’s, and the world today. His aim throughout his career was to capture through the lens. You could say that Ansel Adams was one of the most important figures in photography, adapting new ideas, settings, and techniques to his images, which produced inspiring images.
For example this image, called, “the face of half dome”, which is one of his most famous landscape images. What makes this image unique is first the crystallised, smooth look of the image, but also the fact that he used all the tonal ranges of an image in black and white. He took inspiration through nature, and the beauty and delicacy of it, which is most likely why his most famous image is a landscape on a mountain which they climbed (him and his crew). Ansel Adams was very respectable with his images and even the journey on creating them, as he tried to inspire many photographers to capture the beauty of nature, but to also respect it, and not leave equipment anywhere.
Furthermore Ansel Adams was one of the main influencers of a group called the f/64, who’s main aim within their photographs where to produce a sharp, detailed, pure image. Through his time in professional landscape imagery, him and another called Fred Archer introduced a method called the “Zone System” which is what you see above. This allows photographers “pre-visualise” their images before, while, and after taking the image. This method became very famous as during this time images where only in black and white, and creating an image with all tones, along with all an suitable image, would overall help photographers develop their craft.
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.
