Ansel Adams was born in 1902, and during the ‘Great Quake’ his nose was broke. He never had this fixed so in school, he didn’t quite fit in and was very shy. This led to him moving schools many times until his father decided to have him tutored outside of school. During this time, he liked to go for walks around the forest and sand dunes around his house. At 14 years old, he got his first camera, a Kodak Box Brownie, and at this age he also visited Yosemite Park for the first time. He admired the landscape views that he saw.

In 1927 he was named the Sierra Club’s official trip photographer which became vital to his success as a photographer as his photographs and writings were published in the Sierra Club Bulletin. He was also heavily involved politically, suggesting improvements of other parks and wildlife areas. This lead to him being wildly known as an artist as well as representative of Yosemite National Park.

With this authority, he was able to win the fight of ensuring that Kings Canyon would be saved and not turned into a dam. To make this possible, he had to make a portfolio of images of Kings Canyon which was 17 inches tall, 13 inches wide and almost 2 inches thick.

Photographer Ansel Adams is known for his black and white landscape photographs of the American West. While taking his images, he would use visualisation to discover how he wanted the final photograph to look if he wasn’t impressed with the original look of it. He used different filters to take a photo to darken the dark colours and brighten the lighter ones. This added more depth and drama to the original landscape.

He created the Zonal System to use while taking photographs to ensure that all different tones were included in the image. The Zone system assigns numbers from 0 – 10 to different brightness values, with 0 representing black, 5 middle grey, and 10 pure white.