Ansel Adams Pictures

Due to the advent of HDR software technology,
we can now produce our own Ansel Adams photos, right?

What better inspiration than Ansel Adams pictures for your education of how to take black and white landscape photos.



Any investigation into black and white photography, tonal range and landscape photography is not complete until you have sought out Adams' story.

This famous photographer of the American West was doing a form of high dynamic range imaging before computers had been invented.

I know what you're thinking. Due to the advent of HDR software technology, we can now produce our own Ansel Adams photos, right?

Well...

How about a little Ansel Adams photography history lesson first?

By the time he was 17, he had already experienced better cameras, equipment, darkroom work, literature, galleries, a trip to the High Sierra and membership into the Sierra Club.

He survived the global influenza in 1919 and in his twenties he made it his life's mission to promote the earth's beauty, whether it was through his photography or piano playing, and inspire others to do so as well.

His earliest published black and white photographs (circa 1921) exhibited the conscientious composition and awareness of tonal range that would become his trademarks. His eyes were already focused upward on the high peaks of Yosemite where he would climb in the most dangerous of conditions with the reward of pointing his camera downward on the sweeping vistas.

Early in his commission years, Adams developed a style with his Korona view camera by using plates of glass and a dark red filter to build up the differences in tone, especially in the clouds. The black-sky effect that still kept its highlights was his vision. Ansel Adams pictures weren't really about how the scene looked, but how it "felt" to him.



It should be noted the importance that large-format cameras played in his works. Since the 1950s, photographers have been familiar with the standard 35-mm format, which is a small negative about 1 3/8 inches in width.

Well, Adams and his peers were packing cameras that could shoot negatives as big as 8x10. An Ansel Adams photography expedition with him was a real hike. He just didn't sling a lightweight camera around his neck and bounce off into the brush. No sir, imagine the bulkiness and awkwardness of a canoe portage. Adams was lugging a giant tripod and cases containing a large-format camera and big, honkin' glass/plate negatives, not to mention food, clothes and whatever else he needed to survive at mountain-top level.

If you were impressed with the detail from your 35-mm photograph, you'd probably need a couple of days to recover from the shock of seeing just how sharp your image was with a large-format camera.

Also, these cameras were capable of small apertures -- we're talking f64 -- which enabled excellent depth of field. Adams even belonged to a group named after this characteristic (Group f/64).

If you've heard of the "zone system", you can thank Adams and fellow lens man Fred Archer. Without going into technical detail, it meant if you were shooting negative film you would expose for the shadows and develop for the highlights.

HDRI: View of Rockville, Dutch Valley, N.B., Canada,
taken from a nearby bluff by Jamie Roach

So how do we apply this zone system concept of Ansel Adams pictures to digital photography?

Try exposing for the highlights. In a photo editor, you can develop for the shadows.

If your meter averages the light and exposes for a mid tone, it's likely the greatest light areas are terribly overexposed -- meaning whiter than white. In other words, you can't extract detail from the highlights if there's nothing there.

HDRI: St. Martins, N.B., Canada, by Jamie Roach

Getting back to high dynamic range imaging, since you're bracketing your exposures, common sense tells you the resulting HDRI will contain details in the highlights and shadows -- just like Ansel Adams pictures. It's up to you to work on the composition. Better pack a lunch and your bug spray, chances are you'll want to explore a little deeper than the edge of the woods.

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