Wednesday, 11 January 2012

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.

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