Ansel Adams - American Photographer

Ansel Adams was born on February 20, 1902 in San Francisco. He became one of America's most celebrated and beloved photographers during his lifetime. Adams is acclaimed for his detailed black-and-white images of landscapes, especially throughout Yosemite National Park and the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California, but his work actually covers everything from natural landscapes to architectural photos and even shots of Los Angeles freeway interchanges.

His style is stark black-and-white, with an clear appreciation for shadow, light, and the many nuances these elements can acquire in a well constructed photograph. He treats each image as a detailed and extremely sharply focused opinion from edge to edge, but the most striking thing about his photographs is his obsessive concentration on shadow and light, using natural light to highlight impartial the trunk of a tree or the sensual curve of a freeway on ramp. Adams was a master of light and darkroom development, and that is the style he developed and is most remembered for during his career as a photographer.

His severe dismal and white images showed greater depth and detail than other landscape photos of the day, which helped design his work current and very collectible. He worked all of his believe negatives in the darkroom, dodging and burning areas that he wanted to highlight or downplay. He could employ entire days and nights feverishly working until he got his intended results from the negatives.

As he became a more experienced photographer, Adams gradually developed a system for creating and developing his negatives that he called the "Zone System." This system was a scientific system that he ragged to effectively manipulate the tonality of the photo. A photographer could study an image, and perfectly recreate it in the finished photograph. The system revolutionized the device photographers shot and developed their work, and photographers everywhere began to spend the system that is unexcited in spend today.

Adams also helped execute a ground-breaking photography group, called Group f/64. It was named after the lens aperture that allows the greatest depth of field and detail in photography. The organization only lasted formally about a year, but it made history by encouraging photographers to consume detail and to produce photography that only eminent the art of the photograph.

Although Adams died in 1984, his work is unruffled extremely current today, and it has been reproduced in everything from calendars to posters and coffee table books. He felt deeply about using his photography as art, and totally opinion the medium and its technicalities, in order to invent the best work possible. Some of his most well-known works include "Moon and Half Dome," "Sand Dunes - Death Valley," "Nevada plunge, Rainbow," and "Canyon de Chelly."