So far, I’ve really enjoyed the Home project. I’ve learned a lot more about editing than I did at GCSE and I’ve experimented with many new types of compositions, such as the still life work, which I’m very proud of and I’m excited to hopefully revisit it in the future. I found still life to be a pretty versatile topic for creating photographs with, and especially with the available equipment in the studio, it gave me a chance to experiment with lighting and different tones that I didn’t have before.
I thought that the photomontage work we did with our final images worked quite well, and it’s definitely something I can see myself revisiting later in the course with new and stronger ideas.
I wasn’t too excited about the work we did with Mary Ellen Bartley and her ‘7 Things Again & Again’ series, but I also think it was quite a good introduction to basic photography and working with lighting and props in a composition.
I quite enjoyed the work with Walker Evans and Darren Harvey-Regan, as I found it very engaging with my own life and the objects in my home. It was also a nice introduction to photomontage using photoshop, which is a technique I hope to use when relevant.
Ansel Adams was known as an American landscape photographer and carried a pictorialist style through out his images. Adams liked to visualise his images before he took them and used the quote “you don’t take a photograph, you make it”. He was also a part of the Group f/64 which refers to a small aperture setting on the camera which allows for great depth of field sharpening the foreground and the background and making the image stand out. This allowed his images to have depth and many different tones throughout them.
ten tones:
Adams based his images off the ten tones ensuring he had every tone in his images. Be doing this it allowed his images to be more dramatic making them stand out to the viewers more.
In this images you can see how Adams used every tone on the scale, once you zoom into the pixels, which made his images more dramatic and drew people in.
face of half dome:
Ansel Adams was known for his most famous images called ‘face of half dome’. The image captured the attention of the public and art in the world. It showed the viewers the sheer mass of the rock and how powerful it made the image with it being so intimidating. The different tones that run throughout the image allow it to take on the sublime look conveying fear and power.
Adams visualised the image before he took it and re-took it until it turned out how he expected it to. On the right is the first image he took without adjusting his camera, however on the left is the image he captured after he used a red filter over the camera lens to make the sky darker. As you can see the image is more in depth with the darker background being more fearful and intriguing.
comparison:
Edward Weston was also an American photographer who influenced many others in the 20th century. Weston was also a part of the Group f/64 who promoted a style of sharply defined, and detailed photography. The photographers in the group focused their work of it being ‘pure’.
Ansel Adams Edward Weston
Adam’s wrote to Weston reassuring him how powerful his work was, “I can’t tell you how swell it was to return to the freshness, the simplicity and the natural strength of your photography”. Both used great depth of field to add sharpness and detail in their images with the ten different tones. This tell us that even though the two were against each other in the photography industry thy got along and thought greatly of each others work.
His images were often monochrome highlighting the beauty in the formations of the landscapes rather than just focusing on the colours present, it adds a dramatic and powerful tone to the images potentially portraying the power of mother nature and the sublime drawing attention to the beauty of the environment around us.
Image Comparisons:
Ansel Adams, part of his ‘in our time’ project
‘This is an old image I took, however, I think it resembles Adams’ work. I edited my image in the same way Adams does his work, changed it to black and white and experimented with the contrast and exposure to make this dramatic image
Ansel Adams was an American landscape photographer. Who is most known for his timeless photograph of the ‘Face of Half Dome’. His extensive knowledge of cameras and the science behind how they worked allowed him to visualise the image before he had even taken it.
Ansel became frustrated when an image would not get developed how he visualized it, therefore, he created the ‘zone system’. This was originally made to determine his vision for tones within a picture it also links to the exposure settings of a camera. The 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 (with no detail), and zone 10 being pure white (with no detail). Theoretically, each zone represents one f-stop in exposure.
Face Of Half Dome
The photo on the left shows the picture that would have been taken without Adams changing the camera’s exposure. Whereas, the photo on the right is the image of which he visualised where the background was zone 10 (pure black).
The story behind the Face Of Half Dome:
On April 10th 1927, Ansel and his four friends set out to go on a hike to photograph this soon to be iconic cliff edge. However, this was not his fist time going to the Half Dome. Ansel had spent four of his teenage summers in the area, and the first time that he photographed it he was fourteen years old.
In order to achieve the dark background Ansel was experimenting with different coloured filters where he was using a yellow filter, however, almost immediately switched to a dark red filer which darkened the sky and added depth into the shadows of the mountain.
He has also created the perfect exposure. The Time element is about shutter speeds which is the duration of time the shutter is open for, therefore how long the film, plate or sensor is exposed to light.
photo literacy:
Ansel Adams is considered to be one of the most famous landscape photographers of all time, above is a photo taken which is a perfect example to use with his zone theory, the trees would be a 0 and the river would be a 0.
Shooting in daylight, into the light shown by the silhouette of the trees most likely used a slow shutter in order to gain a sharp clear image.
Here are some pictures of the contact sheet of my first photoshoot I have done. My first photoshoot is of Le Hocq and around that area. 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 are my outcomes from my first romanticism photoshoot. Some also have quite urban aspects.
Ansel Adams was an American photographer, born in San Francisco, who was best known for his landscape images which showed the raw beauty of nature as Adams wanted to conserve the beauty of nature. He grew up near the Golden Gate where he liked to go and explore which is why he would hike up in the National parks to get his final images. In 1919 he joined the Sierra Club and spent four years in Yosemite Valley, where he took many of his most famous images and started his success. In 1928 he had his first one man exhibition at the club’s San Francisco headquarters.
Adams was apart of a group called ‘f/64’ which refers to a small aperture setting to enable you to get a large depth of field and everything being sharp and in focus. There were 11 members in the group who wanted to promote ‘pure’ photography.
He would vision his image before taking it (visualisation) because he wanted to capture what he could see in front of him. This would involve changing the filter he used to get different exposures. Adams used a Brownie Box camera which was given to him when he first visited Yosemite National Park. The camera is seen below.
The image see above was captured after Adams had hiked along Yosemite’s LeConte Gully to the ‘diving board’. The feature capture is the Yosemite National Park’s most iconic features. When he first took the photo he used a yellow filter however, the image didn’t come out how he had visualised it. Adams then changed the filter to a dark red one which made the sky darker and produced the contrast between the shadows and bright white snow which is visible in the final image.
Ansel used a zoning system he created to ensure his images he taken had the contrast he wanted which to be displayed and visible in all his final images.
The zone system
Image Analysis:
This is a digital photo of the Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming. The mis-en-scene presents the Snake River and the Grand Tetons. It also presents cloudy areas in the photo which can be seen in the top left third. The right side of the image contrasts with the rest of the image as it is vastly darker than the rest of the photo. The use of light is natural and is coming from the left of the image which is why there is a shadow on the right side. This photo has been taken from a straight on angle from somewhere higher than the river which enables Adams to get the river and mountains in the frame. All of the image is in focus which suggests that the image was taken with a large depth of field. The colours and tone of the image is monochrome. The photographer has used leading lines as the river draws you to the mountains. He has also, clearly used the rule of thirds.
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.
Ansel Adams in an an American photographer and environmentalist, who was the most important landscape photographer of the 20th century
His images were often monochrome highlighting the beauty in the formations of the landscapes rather than just focusing on the colours present, it adds a dramatic and powerful tone to the images potentially portraying the power of mother nature and the sublime drawing attention to the beauty of the environment around us.
He came up with a technique he referred to as the zone system, the 11 zones were defined to represent the gradation of all the different tones you can see in a black and white, with zone 5 being in the middle as grey, zone 0 being pure black, and zone 10 being pure white.
GROUP F/64
He helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating “pure” photography which favored sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph…even creating a Zonal System to ensure that all tonal values are represented in the images. Ansel Adams was an advocate of environmental protection, national parks and creating an enduring legacy of responses to the power of nature and sublime conditions…Other members in Group f/64 included Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, Imogen Cunningham among other female photographers who has been overlooked in the history or photography.
One of the most important legacies of Adams is the way in which his photographs contributed to the American conservation movement. His technical expertise and the undeniable beauty of his work paved the way for photography to be exhibited beside traditional painting and portraiture in national galleries.
The face of half dome
When speaking of Ansel Adams’ photography, the most famous is Monolith, the Face of Half Dome. This was Adams’ first photograph that gathered the attention of the public and the art world. Using his Korona camera, Adams captured his iconic photo of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park after a difficult hike.
visualisation
Photographic visualization is the confluence of imagination and technique. It is the ability to picture the essence of the final print in your mind before releasing the shutter.
Adams believed strongly in the notion of ‘visualisation’, though today you’ll likely hear it referred to as ‘previsualisation’. This involves a photographer standing in front of a scene and seeing the final image in their mind (right down the post-processing) before even pressing the shutter.
His black and white nature photography was known for being a rejection of the Pictorialism movement that came before – a heavily manipulated style of photography that aimed to enhance the beauty of the subject matter instead of documenting reality. Instead, Ansel Adams wanted to capture exactly what he saw.
