Ansel Adams life
Ansel Adams was born in San Francisco in 1902 which was just before the big earthquake which took place in 1906 .When he was 4 years old he had an accident where he broke and disfigured his nose which sadly wasn’t fixable. This lead to him being bullied and made fun of in school so because of that he moved around a lot and it got to the point where his dad had to sort out home-schooling for him. After this he found lots of enjoyment and comfort in walking around the sand dunes and forest around his home in his free time.
Later in his life when he was doing his studies he was really interested in both photography and music as he wanted to be a pianist. However he realised he was better suited for photography so he stopped the idea of becoming a musician and focused on photography. When he was 14 years old he had his first camera which was Kodak Brownie where he would go around the mountains Sierra Nevada with his family and take photos with his camera.
All of Adams work was based on nature due to his absolute love and fascination with nature he loved to focus on environmentalism. He was quite young by the time he got his exhibition . In was only in 1922 where he had some of his photography first published and then in 1928 he had his first one man exhibition and he was only 26.
However his life changed in 1927 when he was the Sierra clubs official trip photographer which is one of the oldest environmental preservation clubs. He was chosen due to his amazing photography skills and due to the fact he genuinely loved those mountains and knew them very well.
His photos were originally used to try and show the beauty of this incredible park because at the time it was still unprotected and there were plans to make it a power source. The strong river in the park made it a very good way for the city of Los Angeles to use it as a hydroelectric power source.
He actually created this book of the kings Canyon of all the photos he’s taken in order to try and convince congress not to ruin the park and not only did he stop them he also go the attention of the Franklin Roosevelt who was president at the time. Later he even got an award for his photography work where they celebrated both his photos and his efforts for helping the park.
Ansel Adams photography
Some people may describe his work as kind of controversial because it was known that he was taking photos to show the natural environment especially his war photos however when he was there he wold actually change some part by moving items around which some people disagreed with. Due to the fact his work was meant o tell the truth about war and the environment and although they aren’t big changed he is still changing the “natural environment”.
All of his photos kind of follow this zone system which you can see there are these levels of black and whites which correspond with the amount of exposure you use in your image. So if you are taking a photo and the object is white if yo have it set in the middle which is the grey colour that white object will end up looking grey so then if you change the exposure to maybe 7 it would be a lighter/whiter shade.
He also used these filters usually yellow or range which would help him achieve the high contrast and darker sky which he had in most of his photos.
However he also used the technique called visualisation where before he would take the photos he would actually imagen what he wanted and how he thought it should look so when he was taking the photos he had something to try and compare it to and it gave him ideas in how he can change his photos into how he imagined them. Within visualisation there’s the idea of the 3 C’s which are said to be correlation, clustering, and colour they are the three aspects of your photos that you want to think about before hand.