Born : Feb 20 1902 Died April 22 1984

Ansel Adams was an American landscape photographer known for his drastic exposure contrast creating dramatic imagery, he normally used a black and white colouring to more distinctly show the differences in exposure.

“Colored and modulated by the great earth gesture“

ANSEL ADAMS in reference to his own life

” His first published photographs and writings appeared in the club’s 1922 Bulletin, and he had his first one man exhibition in 1928 at the club’s San Francisco headquarters.

By 1934 Adams had been elected to the club’s board of directors and was well established as both the artist of the Sierra Nevada and the defender of Yosemite.

His creative energies and abilities as a photographer blossomed, and he began to have the confidence and wherewithal to pursue his dreams. Indeed, Bender’s benign patronage triggered the transformation of a journeyman concert pianist into the artist whose photographs, as critic Abigail Foerstner wrote in the Chicago Tribune (Dec. 3, 1992), “did for the national parks something comparable to what Homer’s epics did for Odysseus.” “

THE ZONE SYSTEM was a system discovered by Ansel Adams and Fred Archer

” not an invention of mine; it is a codification of the principles of sensitometry, worked out by Fred Archer and myself at the Art Center School in Los Angeles, around 1939–40.”

Ansel Adams in regards to the zone system

DEFINITION

The technique is based on the late 19th-century sensitometry studies of Hurter and Driffield. 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. Although it originated with black-and-white sheet film, the Zone System is also applicable to roll film, both black-and-white and color, negative and reversal, and to digital photography.

PROCESS

Although zones directly relate to exposure, visualization relates to the final result. A black-and-white photographic print represents the visual world as a series of tones ranging from black to white. Imagine all of the tonal values that can appear in a print, represented as a continuous gradation from black to white:

From this starting point, zones are formed by first dividing the tonal gradation into ten equal sections, all one stop apart, plus one more for blown-out paper white.

Note:The darker shades may not be distinguishable on some monitors.

Then for each section, one average tone represents all the tonal values in that section.

Finally, the zones are defined by numbering each section with Roman numerals from 0 for the black section to X for the white one.

DEFINTION :

Visualization (graphics), the physical or imagining creation of images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message. Data and information visualization, the practice of creating visual representations of complex data and information.

The Zone System is concerned with the control of image values, ensuring that light and dark values are rendered as desired. Anticipation of the final result before making the exposure is known as visualization.