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.

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.

John Constable was born in Suffolk, England, and is mainly known for revolutionising the genre of landscape paintings and Romanticism and the Sublime.

John was never financially stable throughout his life, even though now his paintings are considered some of the most popular and expensive in British art. He attended the Royal Academy of arts at the age of 52, then further went on to sell most of his art work in Franc where his art was most embraced.

Most of John Constables paintings were based around where he live/grew up.

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The Hay Wain

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This painting depicts a rural scene on the River Stour between the English counties of Suffolk and Essex.

A hay wain is A large open vehicle, drawn by horses, used to carry loads of hay; a haywagon.

Constable’s father owned 90 acres of land surrounding this painting, this further shows how John was privileged and from a upper class family. Yet his paintings include people from a working class background which seem to be working hard to gain an income

why did john constable paint the hay wain?

Constable’s decision to paint these scenes was an emotional reaction to a crisis beyond his control, and probably understanding. He painted images that he saw in his mind, drawn from his happy childhood days. His attachment to such images of the nature of the countryside never ceased in his life.

John Constable

Johns was a good landscape artist who believed closely in painting his own personal or preference of places. In fact he was very good at it for his time, as his paintings also represented a story you could say. For example:

This is one of his famous landscape paintings, where he presents a whole picture of farm life in the 18th century. With a deeper meaning to the painting being the growing tension between farm land owners and their workers.

This painting alone shows a peaceful day, where one of the workers is cooling off a horse next to the small farm owners house. I like how in his landscape he presented the whole image. Like the trees close up on the left with a small house, then the main “action” you could say is at the front, in a pond, and the fluffy clouds on the right. It literally paints a picture / feeling to the setting.

During 1821 there where some machines but not many, and what interest me about this painting is that there is very old fashioned, objects painting, very natural equipment. This could link John Constables painting to Romanticism, as he had also said that, “painting is another word for feeling” and feelings where the main “objective” you could say for romanticism.

Ansel Adams was an American landscape photographer. He was best known for his black and white photos of the American West.

In the beginning of his journey as a photographer, he took photos as a visual diary of his experience. This links to David Campany and how he says that photographs can capture special moments people want to keep forever, or that they could simply be to document something.

On April 10th 1927, Ansel Adams went to the diving board in Yosemite National Park to photograph the Half Dome. He had a vision of what he wanted his photo to look like, he felt inspired. Firstly, he used a yellow filter when taking the photograph. A yellow filter is commonly used in black and white film to absorb all light except yellow. However, the photograph was not what he visualised, there was no excitement in the photo. So, he took out his red filter and exposed the camera for 5 seconds. A red filter which transmits only red light and absorbs all other colours. This matched his vision.

The photograph he took with the yellow filter is on the left. The photograph with the red filter is on the right. The red filtered image is much more well exposed and makes the photograph look a lot more dramatic and allows the focus to just be on the rock.

“You don’t take a photograph, you make it.”

Ansel Adams

This is one of Ansel Adams’ most famous quotes. I think this is important as it tells photographers that you should have to work to create a photograph. When you ‘take’ a photo, you don’t really create it. It communicates the lack of creativity. I think it kind of implies how you are taking something that isn’t your own. When you ‘make’ a photograph, it implies that creative decisions where made in order to produce that photo and that you made it your own.

The Zone System

The Zone System was created by Fred Archer, a portrait photographer, and Ansel Adams. It is a scale consisting of 11 tone values which allows a photographer to achieve optimal film exposure and ensure that the photographs are properly exposed each and every time. The darkest tone value on the scale is Zone 0 (Pure Black) and the lightest is Zone 10 (Pure White). Adams and Archer first introduced their method at the Art Centre School of Design in Pasadena, California. They said that it would help photographers to analyse the brightness levels of the landscape and manage the way those brightness levels would be rendered in the final printing.

Below is a black and white photograph labelled with the zones corresponding to the tone values in the picture.

The Zone System has helped so many photographers develop their work. Ansel’s photographic assistant, Alan Ross, brought the Zone System back into modern day. He said that the Zone System allows you to “achieve more accurate, consistent and planned results”. Ross was a photographer best known for his black and white photos of the American West. Below is one of his photographs which he has used the Zone System to achieve optimal film exposure and create a well-exposed image.

Group f/64

Group f/64 was a group of photographers founded in 1932 who had similar photographic styles. The group consisted of; 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. Their photographs had a sharp focus and were carefully framed.

I think the name is original and quite creative as f/64 is an f-stop which represents the smallest aperture possible when using large-format view cameras at that time. F/64 allows as much of the picture as possible to be in sharp focus as it has the greatest depth of field. It allows the photograph to be really good quality and be really clear with lots of definition. This is a very important element in the group members’ work.

Ansel Adams was born on February 20, 1902 and died on April 22, 1984 He was well known as an American landscape photographer and environmentalist who specialised in his black and white images of the American West. He helped found Group f/64 which is an association of photographers advocating “pure” photography which favoured sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph. He joined the Sierra Club in 1919, which was an environmental group established to preserve the natural wilderness of the Yosemite Sierra. During the group’s hikes and camping trips, Ansel 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 then published his first photographs in the club’s 1922 bulletin. Adams also claimed the he would “vision” his image before taking it because he wanted to capture what he could exactly what he saw in the present.

These are some pictures of his work.

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The term f/64 refers to a small aperture setting on a large format camera, which secures great depth of field, rendering a photograph evenly sharp from foreground to background.

Group f/64 was created when Ansel Adams and Willard Van Dyke, an apprentice of Edward Weston, decided to organize some of their fellow photographers to promote a common aesthetic principle. In 1930s Van Dyke established a small photography gallery in his home. He called the gallery 683 in honour of the name of his house “as our way of thumbing our nose at the New York people who didn’t know us”, a direct reference to Stieglitz and his earlier New York gallery called 291. Van Dyke’s home/gallery became a gathering place for a close circle of photographers that eventually became the core of Group f/64. Many different Photographers gathered at Van Dyke’s home decided to put together a group exhibition of their work. They convinced the director at the de Young Museum to give them the space, and on November 15, 1932, the first exhibition of Group f/64 opened to large crowds. The group members in the exhibition were Ansel Adams (10 photographs),. Four other photographer were invited to join the exhibition, each contributing four photographs. Edward Weston’s prints were priced at $15 each; all of the others were $10 each. The show ran for six weeks.

To create this picture he put a red colour filter at the end of his lens to manipulate the shades and tones of the photo, this gave the photo a monochrome look and feel.

Contact Sheet

I’m not happy with the way this shoot turned out as the lighting wasn’t good. I spent a day going to different areas in Jersey, but the weather darkened the light, so there was no drama or intensity in the sky. I will try and re-shoot these images on a better day as I would really like to capture light behind clouds, and on the cliffs to create a less dark set of images.

The 4 places that i have put ovals around are where i am considering doing my photoshoot. These places consist of Greve De Lecq, Plemont, Portelet Bay and Rozel Bay

I am going to be taking photos of natural landscapes such as beaches, cliffs and fields while trying to avoid man made objects such as houses and cars. I am also going to try and avoid capturing people in my photos up close. I haven’t decided if I am going to create the images in monochrome inspired from Ansel Adams or keep the colour in the picture inspired by Josef Schultz, Another aspect which will help determine my decision is what the weather is like as I plan to go out on the 19th or 20th of November. If the weather is windy and raining I will be able to capture more lively and chaotic pictures due the waves and the trees being effected by this, or if its more of a clam day and bright. I would be able to capture more light which would differ the colour of the picture.

Fact file

Born in 1902 on February 20th in the USA, Adams was a photographer with a preference for a full tonal range in his pictures. He married in 1928 and had two children, Anne and Michael Adams. Unfortunately, Ansel met his untimely end in 1984. ​

In his life, Adams was part of a group called f/64. It was founded by 20th-century San Francisco Bay Area photographers; 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. These photographers shared a common photographic style characterized by sharply focused and carefully framed images.

image analysis

In this image, I thought Ansel Adams had cleverly constructed the photograph since the image directs our view point through the use of leading lines. in this image, it is the lake that acts as a leading line as it creates a path that leads the viewers eyes around the image stopping at the top of the mountain. Having this position of the lake also help to create a feel of depth to the image, also meaning that when taking the photo Adams must have considered where certain shadows and highlights would be.

This photo has been taken at face on angle with the camera aiming towards the mountain​. The picture being in black and white gives an eerie feeling due to the amount of darkness seen in the image along with the cloudy grey sky, however, it could be argued that the picture also has a calming atmosphere by the lake bringing light back into the image. The black and white within the image helps to add a dramatic flair to the image which is a common theme throughout his pictures.

In this image, the big, dramatic clouds shown behind the mountain top give off an anxious feeling to the viewer since the appearance of them resemble a sandstorm about to cover the mountains and trees below.​

The rule of thirds is shown here too, where the mountain and clouds joining in the middle right of the image. Adams used leading lines through the use of the curved mountain edges pointing towards the trees below.​ The viewer would probably feel anxious when observing this image due to the huge clouds raining down on the mountain. ​

This picture was taken from a eye- level view, we can tell this by the fact that the trees are taller than the perspective. This picture uses natural lighting and the focus point of the image is the mountain due to it being the largest thing in the image, naturally drawing our eyes to it. ​

The image might be trying to show the beauty of nature due to the lighting and placement of the image. It also appears to be very detailed form the reflection of the lake to the individual leaves on the trees standing out.

I like how perfectly timed this image was with the wave crashing into the rock making it dramatic. The photo was taken from a hillside at a high angle using a front person perspective to capture the image. He also uses high contrast in this image due to the colour variation. ​

The Zone System

The Zone System is a photographic technique for determining optimal film exposure and development, formulated by Ansel Adams and Fred Archer.