Homage to Ansel Adams

Ansel Adams is best known for his use of the large format camera which allowed him to capture stunning landscape and nature images. Every photography is at the highest detail and showcase a full range of black and white tones. Adams specificically used a view camera which required him to control every step of the photograph he took. Controlling the tonal range was very crucial to his work along with the zone system he created. Large negatives were used in order to make prints that show even the tiny details. The use of this camera allows the artist to choose exactly which parts of the photograph are to be in focus and this whole process is very different to using a camera with auto focus and exposure settings. The equipment needed to take each shot was very heavy which put many photographers off taking images using the 10X8 large format cameras on rural landscapes. Because Adams was exposing just one sheet of film at a time he was able to apply the zone system he created to previsualize each image before he even took it and develop it specifically for that shot. This zone system is what makes his work so unique as many other photographers were unable to achieve the density range of whites and blacks likes Adams. With several other artists such as Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham and Willard VanDyke created the group f/64 to show their dedication to the genre of photography. The name f/64 comes from the aprture setting on the camera which is the smallest hole for the light to pass through the lens. This required a long shutter speed but was rewarded with a very large and vast depth of field able to capture the whole of a landscape in focus. For my homage to Ansel Adams work I found a rural landscape with a range of blacks, greys and whites and photographed it using a DSLR camera using the highest f stop number on my camera at f/22. This allowed me to capture a large depth of field and large range of tones. I also thought about the composition and use of shapes to flow the eye around the image like in Adams work.