Blog Entry #12 - Ansel Adams Mentor

Ansel Adams (1902-1984) was one of America’s greatest photographers, famous for his black and white photographs of natural landscapes of the American West, especially of Yosemite National Park.[1] His first encounter with photography was when he visited Yosemite in 1916 when he was only 14 years old and took pictures with a Kodak No. 1 Box Brownie camera from his parents. The connection he felt with the landscape there transformed his life and he returned to Yosemite each year to photograph it until his death.[2] Although Adams was trained as a concert pianist from an early age, by the age 30, he had changed his mind and chose a career in photography instead. Adams’ photographs were significant in three main ways. Firstly, because he was very artistic, Adams’ photographs helped to establish photography as an art form. His photographs were also significant because he developed photographic techniques and processes in the dark room that improved the creativity of the images. Finally, his photographs inspired an appreciation of the wilderness and became very influential in protecting it.[3]

Ansel Adams Photographing in Yosemite

One of the main reasons that Ansel Adams’ photographs were important was because he was a great artist and could bring together different elements in a landscape and produce a photograph that was a work of art. [4] In 1933 when he visited Alfred Stieglitz, a famous photographer in New York, Stieglitz said, “these are some of the finest photos I’ve ever seen”.[5] Stieglitz’s appreciation of Adams’ artistic ability played a vital role in his career and in 1936 he gave Adams his own show at An American Place. Adams had begun his career in the 1920’s with a pictorial style where the idea was to make photographs look like paintings rather than reflections of reality.[6] But by the 1930’s he dedicated himself to the principles of “pure” photography where the artistic power of a photograph came from trying to capture reality rather than avoid it.[7] He became one of the most successful photographers at achieving this through his ability to convey the full range of tones, light and texture. In 1932 he founded the Group f/64 with another photographer, Edward Weston, which was very influential in bringing the idea of pure photography to the rest of the photography world.[8]  The Mount Williamson photograph is a good example of Adams’ artistic ability because he uses the clearing storm clouds and lighting on the mountains to contrast with the sky. He manages to keep a sharp focus on both the rocks in the foreground and the distant peaks in the background to create a feeling of depth and uses shadows and tonal variations to bring out the texture of the rocks. 

Mount Williamson, The Sierra Nevada, from Manzanar, California, 1945

The significance of Adams’ photographs came not only from the fact that they were artistic but because they reflected the importance Adams put on the technical side of photography as the other half of the creative process. Adams was disappointed with his first photographs which were just snapshots so he learnt how to develop his own prints and negatives and experimented with different processes in the dark room.[10]  He started in the 1920’s by using techniques that achieved the softened and blurred images of pictorialism. But in 1927 he took a pivotal photograph, called the “Monolith, The Face of Half Dome” that made him abandon the pictorial style. By using a red filter and compensating with a longer exposure time, he produced a negative in which the sky was darker and achieved the dramatic contrast with the distant white peak that he wanted in order to match what he had seen and felt, or “visualized”, at the time of taking the photograph.[11] This was the day he started to develop his theory of “visualization” that then led to his scientific technique called the “Zone system” which allowed a photographer to control and relate exposure and development in order to produce an image that matched their creative visualization at the time of taking the photograph.[12] By the end of his career, Adams had produced many of the most influential technical books on photography that had ever been written.[13]

Monolith, The Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, California, 1927

Although Adams never set out to take his landscape photographs specifically for environmental purposes, his artistic and technical skills allowed his photographs to reflect his message that the natural world was beautiful and needed to be preserved. In this way Adams’ photographs became significant in influencing the protection of the environment from the effects of human activities.[14] Adams was criticized in the 1930’s by Henri Cartier-Bresson for not photographing humans and their social problems during the Depression, but ironically the environment became the number one issue by the end of  the century.[15] Adams influenced President Franklin Roosevelt to create the Kings Canyon National Park in 1940, after he took photographs from his book “Sierra Nevada: John Muir Trail” with him to lobby Senate on behalf of the Sierra Club, an environmental group of which he was a board director. The “Rae Lake” photograph is an example of one of the photographs from his book and demonstrates Adams’ ability to inspire an appreciation for the natural beauty of the wilderness and the need to conserve it. Adams continued to be committed as a photographer and environmentalist for the rest of his career. After his death, as a tribute to Adams’ environmental contribution, Congress set aside a vast tract of wilderness of the Sierra Nevada and named it “The Ansel Adams Wilderness”.

 Rae Lake,  Sierra Nevada: John Muir Trail,  1938

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[1] Turnage, William. "Ansel Adams Biography." Anseladams.com. The Ansel Adams

   Gallery, 2012. Web.

[2] Ansel Adams. Dir. Rick Burns. Narr. David Ogden Stiers. PBS - Warner Home Video, 2002. DVD.

[3] Sierra Club. "Ansel Adams History." Sierra Club.org. Sierra Club, 2012. Web. 7 Jan. 2012.

[4] Ansel Adams

[5] Ansel Adams

[6] Turnage

[7] Ansel Adams

[8] Turnage

[9] Hausatonic Museum of Art. "ANSEL ADAMS: Classic Images – Mount Williamson, The Sierra

   Nevada." Hcc.commnet.edu. Housatonic Community College. Web.

[10] Ansel Adams

[11] Hausatonic Museum of Art. "ANSEL ADAMS: Classic Images - Monolith, The Face of

   Half Dome." Hcc.commnet.edu. Housatonic Community College. Web.

[12] Turnage

[13] Turnage

[14] Sierra Club

[15] Ansel Adams

Blog Entry #12 - A Photograph In Ansel Adams' Style

I tried to use the things I had learnt about Ansel Adams’ photographs to take a photograph that was in his style.

Artistic Elements

Ansel Adams talked about trying to take a photo that showed how he felt about what he saw so I kept this in mind when I was composing the photo. The sun was starting to go down so I wanted to convey that feeling with the last light shining behind the row of trees. The sky had been really unusual that day with a mixture of blue and changing dark clouds so I knew I wanted to have a low enough horizon to capture that. Texture was an important part of Adams’ work and my subject area was the marsh of bulrushes and grasses dried for the winter and bent over in the wind which reminded me of large wheat field that you could run through. I framed the marsh on the right side with the trees but left it unframed to the left to give the feeling of the openness and depth that the marsh gave me. 

Techniques

I experimenting placing the tripod at different angles and tried it on the board walk and fence at different heights as I had seen that Adams spent a lot of time adjusting his body position and that of his tripod to get the angle he wanted.

He also spent hours in his dark room to produce different prints of the same negative to for example, darken the sky or accentuate spots of light. I did the same but used photoshop as my equivalent dark room to ….

Environmental Purpose

The subject of Adams’ photos was the wilderness of the Yosemite National Park which he wanted preserved. I chose Rattray Marsh for my subject because I enjoy going there to walk and enjoy the nature. The photo I took was in appreciation of  its’ environmental importance for my area which is that it is the only lakefront marsh habitat left between Toronto and Burlington and was saved from a developer who planned to fill it in and build homes.

Blog Entry #11 - Cyanotype

For my third and final alternative process, I chose to do a cyanotype, which involves using chemicals on water color paper and the sunlight outside. The final result is a blue "positive" of your image from the acetate.

I used the picture of the buildings I took in Toronto because I like how the sky really stands out because of the difference of color from the buildings. The picture has lots of different types of line in it, leading your eye around the picture. The only problem I found with using this picture is that the cyanotype turned out a little bit too light both times I tried it.

Blog Entry #10 - Silk Screening

For this alternative process, it was much more time consuming and complicated then the acrylic lift, but I was happy with the result. I had to get the silk screen, paint on the special ink in the darkroom, and then expose it to light while a negative was overtop. I then washed off the paint so that it was a see through image on the canvas. I can now use it to paint that image onto whatever I choose.

I chose this photo for the silk screen because I thought the landscape looked like a painting and would be effective as a print to transfer to other mediums, like a T-shirt or canvas. The image breaks the composition rules because the path through the forest is in the middle of the picture rather than following the rule of thirds. But this works well in this case to give depth to the landscape and pull the viewer’s eyes into the picture to explore the forest in the distance. I was attracted by the ghostly figures created by the tall pines and the leafless birch trees with their silver bark. Together with the other features such as the rocks, moss and fog, this scene reminds me of a prehistoric setting where you wonder what strange creatures lurk in the forest.

Blog Entry #9 - Acrylic Lift

One of the two alternative processes i chose was an acrylic lift, which is when you paint a substance onto paper and get the image onto that substance so that it is an easily manipulated piece of acrylic paper. For the use of the picture i decided to make a CD case, as this paper easily folded and unfolded. I used 12 layers of the substance to get the optimum consistency.

I knew straight away which photograph I wanted to use for this process. The funky colourful graffiti image lends itself perfectly to the acrylic because it gives a modern, cool look to the image that suits the graffiti and makes it into a hi tech material with a texture that makes the graffiti look three dimensional. I folded the acrylic to make a CD holder because the image reminded me of the kind of photo you would find on CD cover and I liked the way you could see the outline of the silver CD inside the cover. I love the way that you can unfold the acrylic and it goes flat again and you can recycle it into a different form.


The image itself works really well even though the subject is in the centre of the picture and there are mergers, which you normally try to avoid, between the black paint strokes of the graffiti and the subject’s head and back pack strap. But breaking the rules have the effect of making Max look more like he is part of the grafitti but with the opposite colour balance since he is mostly in black with a small splash of colour and pattern on his shirt.

Blog Entry #8 - Breaking The Rules

The scene of the lake breaks a normal rule of composition because it is taken at an angle. I think this makes it a much more active scenery picture than if it was taken straight on because it creates a lot of diagonal lines. The perspective that the image gives the viewer is that they are sitting amongst the fallen leaves at the bottom right of the picture in a canoe at dusk, looking across to the furthest point on the other side of the lake, where the two triangles, which are formed by the tree line and its reflection, merge together. The triangle shapes are repeated in the foreground by the fallen branches and their reflections and contrast with the lighter larger triangles formed by the sky and its reflection.

The stairs photograph breaks the “Rule of Thirds” because the subject, which is the stairs, goes right up the centre of the picture. In this case it works well because of the symmetry it creates which has the effect of pulling the viewer into the scene and up the stairs. This effect is helped by the fact that the image is framed by the doorway and the open door which invites the viewer to look up the stairs. There is also interest and texture provided by the climbing plant on the right hand wall at the bottom of the stairs which is echoed by the tree branches higher up the stairs on the left side. 

This portrait doesn’t follow the normal rules of composition that would place the subject further back so that there is some space around them and wouldn’t cut of part of their head. Breaking the rules works in this photo because the subject’s expression shows that he seems to be observing the photographer rather than the other way round and so having the subject leaning in very close to the lens and cropping the top of the head emphasises this idea. The flick on his hair helps to soften the cropping and the merger of his hair with the poster on the wall, which is normally against the rules, helps to give humour to the image.  The perspective of the hallway in the background gives a feeling of depth that helps the close-up work.

Blog Entry #7 - Three Different Lighting Techniques

Allie

To take this picture I used a canon rebel, and I adjusted the lighting so that there was only one light on, and it shone on the right side of the subject's face. By using this lighting technique, it created a shadow on the entire left side of her face, which in my opinion makes the picture more mysterious. The mysterious effect is also achieved by the facial expression she has (unsmiling). This lighting angle also works well because it accents her blonde hair that hangs on the right side of her body.