Ansel Easton Adams was born on February 20, 1902 in San Francisco, California. While on the trip with his family, his father gave him his first camera, a Kodak brownie box camera. He used this camera to take his first photographs. His first trip to the Yosemite valley sparked an interest in him so he returned a year later, by himself, with a tripod and some better cameras. After that, he learned basic techniques while working for a photographer in SF. In his twenties, Adams' life philosophy was inspired by Edward Carpenter's Towards Democracy, a literary work which talked about the pursuit of beauty in life and art. He then decided that from then on, his art was to reveal that beauty to others and to inspire them to the same calling.
Ansel Adams' first photos were published in 1921 and a year later Best Studios started to sell them. Adams used different lenses for certain effects but mainly went for a more realistic approach meaning he relied on sharp focus, contrast, exposure, and "darkroom craftsmanship". 1927 he made a contract for his first portfolio, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras, which contained the famous image called Monolith, the face of half dome.
For this image, Adams used a Korona view camera, glass plates, and a dark red filter. The red filter helped make the sky appear darker. He said "I had been able to realize a desired image: not the way the subject appeared in reality but how it felt to me and how it must appear in the finished print". This is what most of his artwork looks like, black&white landscapes with tonal contrast. These types of images is what he is famous for. Adams did try to broaden his subject matter to include still life and close-up photos, and to achieve higher quality by "visualizing" each image before taking it. He used small apertures and long exposures in natural light to create sharp details with a wide range of focus. An example of this would be Rose and Driftwood (1933).
During the 1930s , he was inspired by the increasing desecration of Yosemite Valley by commercial development. He created a limited-edition book in 1938, Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail, as part of the Sierra Club's efforts to secure the designation of Sequoia and Kings Canyon as national parks. This book and his testimony before Congress played a vital role in the success of the effort, and Congress designated the area as a National Park in 1940.
-President Jimmy Carter commissioned him to take the first ever picture portrait of a president.
- he died April 22, 1984
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