Bryan's Photography Blog

Soooo....Myers is making me waste a blog post by posting this...yea...

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Bryan Johnson
13 March 2009
Ansel Adams

Ansel Adams was born on February 20, 1902. He is an American photographer that is best known for his black-and-white photos of the American west. Adams used large format cameras to get high resolution in his photos. Although those cameras are heavy, large, take a long time to set up, and their film costs a lot, Adams used them because of the large amount of clarity they produced. He is responsible for helping found the Museum of Modern Art's department of photography. As a child, Adams was raised to live a modest and moral life with a responsibility to man and nature, following the ideals of transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson. Adams took an immediate liking to nature and spent much of his time walking on the beach and collecting bugs. Although he was obsessed with music (he had a photographic memory so he quickly learned to read music and play the piano) and applied himself to becoming a concert pianist, Adams gained a passion for photography when his family took a trip to Yosemite National Park in 1916. From then on, he began to get interested in photography and learned basic darkroom developing techniques. At 17, Adams joined the Sierra Club, a group that is dedicated to preserving the world's natural resources. In 1921, Adams' first photographs were published and his Yosemite prints began selling the following year. Adams was greatly influenced by Edward Carpenter's Toward Democracy, and he took it upon himself to photograph to portray the beauty of nature to others. Adams helped pioneer the zone system, a technique for translating perceived light into specific densities on negatives and paper, giving photographers better control over finished photographs (Wikipedia.org). He also promoted visualization, where the artist sees the photograph they want to get in their mind's eye. Ansel Adams died on April 22, 1984 at the age of 82 from heart failure.

My Shots:

Um, so let's see here. My intention was to take some emulation shots for an assignment and I did it. I think the panorama of the Coors mountains is ok ('cept for the vertical lines because of the stupid stitcher), but I'm not really crazy about them. I think, overall, I did a pretty good job emulating Adams. He is mostly known for taking shots that show the true spirit of the west, so I decided to show that through the rockies.