Ansel Adams At Work. Capturing Time.

Ansel Adams.No need for any introduction, one of the giants of photography.

I recently saw a documentary about him in YouTube “Ansel Adams: A Documentary Film 2002″ and i wanted to share it with you. It might give us some inspiration for this weekend, if not for our entire life.

 

I also stepped over a series of videos uploaded from Getty Museum in YouTube about Ansel Adams.

 

But what sparkled even more my interest was the video titled “Ansel Adams: Climbing Half Dome, Yosemite” . The climb towards the taking of his well known photograph , “Monolith, The Face of Half Dome.”

The Story Goes like this…

On an April morning in 1927, Adams undertook a difficult four-thousand-foot climb through heavy snow to the granite outcropping known as the Diving Board, where he set up his 6 1/2 x 8 1/2-inch view camera, inserted a glass plate, and waited for the light to fall directly on the sheer granite cliff.

He made one exposure with a yellow filter. Then it occurred to him that if he used a dark red filter, both sky and cliff would register darker in the finished print than in the actual scene. He changed to the red filter, with this dramatic result. He described this episode as his first “visualization” — his attempt to express the emotional and aesthetic feelings he felt at the time he made the photograph. Adams considered it a seminal moment in his development as a photographer.

Monolith, The Face of Half Dome, 1927, Ansel Adams