My first artist : Ansel Adams Mood board

Overview on Ansel Adams Photography

Ansel Adams is a landscape photographer and took most of his images of the environment, usually trees and flowers or picturesque landscapes from the top of mountains and rivers or taking images of these magnificent landscapes looking up from the ground to show the sheer size and enormity of these mountains. His photos are all in black and white and his images are very heavily shadowed which emphasizes the key features of the photos such as the image with the river because the mountain in the background is so heavily shadowed and the river has the sun beams reflecting on it, the river stands out very clearly against the dark shadows making it clearer to see the leading lines of the image.

Why I chose Ansel Adams?

I chose Ansel Adams as my first artist because he photographs the beauty of nature and life. His work looks at high contrast black and white images of the American west specifically showcasing the natural beauty of trees. His tree photographs almost give a new life to the images and show the trees in a different light making them look much more appealing than how they looked before they were edited to be high resolution black and white images.

Ansel Adams Photography

Ansel Adams photography is of lots of living nature such as trees and flowers and the beauty of life which contrasts against my theme for my book which was about one of my grandparents life. I chose to combine these two themes because I wanted to get images of the nature and plants and put them with pictures of my grandads life to show how precious his life was and to celebrate his life. The bright white in this image of a flower shows the purity and preciousness of the flower and almost shows how special and sacred the flower is. The white balance gives the image cold lighting which makes it come across as a very dramatic and striking image and it makes it look like there is a deeper meaning behind the image.

What inspired Ansel Adams ?

Ansel Adams was strongly influenced by Alfred Stieglitz whom he met in 1933 at an American Place gallery in New York City. He was given his first camera at 14 during his first visit to Yosemite national park where he discovered his love for nature and how to show the purity of inanimate objects.

This is Alfred Stieglitz image and it shows the comparison with Ansel Adams image and how similar the lighting and the shadow is with each of the images. The shadows in both images clearly define the features of what is being photographed and show clearly the amount of detail in the image. These two photos are similar as they are both black and white images and they are taken with a very narrow depth of field and they are both very detailed images

He made Urban Landscapes and was a documentary photographer. His technical methods changed and he began to use colour film and a large format camera.