Ansel Adams was an American landscape photographer and conservationist. He was mainly known for his monochrome images of national parks. Adams was a life-long advocate of environmental conservation, It was at age 14 when Adams was given his first camera during his first ever visit to Yosemite Park, he later developed his earlier work as a member of the Sierra Club. He was later contacted by the United States Department of Interior to take pictures of the national parks for which he was later awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980.

Adams and Fred Archer were the inventors of a thing called the zone system, which is a method of achieving the wanted image through technical understanding of the tonal range in the image. The zone technique is what helped photographers in that time determine the optimal film exposure and development. ” The Zone System provides photographers with a systematic method of precisely defining the relationship between the way they visualize the photographic subject and the final results. ” – Quotation marks pasted from Wikipedia.

F/64

Adams was one of the seven founders of the group f/64 which founded in in the San Francisco Bay Area in the American 20th century which was an association which was advocating for ” pure ” photography which was a style of photography which favoured the sharp focus and the use of full tonal range without the image, as well as a carefully framed image.

The group mainly formed in opposition to the pictorialist movement which was dominant for the majority of the early 20th century. Whereas the f/64 group wanted to encourage a modernist take to photography which focused on precisely exposed images and natural forms.

examples of the pictorialist movement:

Adam Analysis

Technical

the type of lighting in this image is harsh natural lighting, with high contrast. As well as the image having a sharp focus. I think the aperture of this image is f/32 as everything is in focus and crisp and nothing in the image is blurry. I think the ISO is 100 due to the clarity of the tones and the good tonal range of the image, you can tell this due to the contrast of the lightest tone in comparison to the darkest tone.

Mise-en-scene

This is image is taken using a film camera and the genre of this photography is landscape.

The mise-en-scene presents the Tetons mountains and the snake river cascading down the middle of the image. The tone of this image has a good range due to the zoning system, however there are some darker spots for example a lot of the forest and a few parts of the mountains. The use of light in this image is harsh, however, it is natural lighting as they are in the Yosemite park. The focus distance is long as the mountains and the river is far away and the depth of field is large as everything is in focus. The  leading lines of the images would be the lightness of where the sunlight is hitting the bend of the river the and top of the mountains that are being hit by the light draw your eye along the image.

I believe the ISO is 100 as everything is in as most of the image is in focus however the background is blurred and grainy. I believe that the shutter speed is 1000 as everything is clear.

Photoshoot

Edited Images

Personally I really like this image because I like the way that the singular rock is the main subject of the image and against the light colour of the sky it looks really nice.

One thing that I have done to edit this image is I created a mask and placed it over a section of the rocks on the left and edited it separately compared to the rest of the image because the way that I edited the whole image made that one area look too dark so I added the mask to be able to lighten it up.

As well as I added vignette to all of the images I took for Ansel Adams to give it an older feel.

I have edited this image by:

Virtual Gallery