The Tentons - Snake River 1942 is a photo that examples Ansell Adams’ style, dropped horizon, filtered and with a darkened sky. Use of his zone technique to get a balance of pure black through his zones to pure white. Adams is inspiring to me through his philosophy that photos can evoke emotions through sensation in the viewer, what the photographer was feeling when capturing the image. Ansel would visualise the end result in his mind and as a child led me to believe that photography can be a fine art medium. Ansel Adams was born in 1902 in San Francisco and died in 1984.
When Ansel took a photo he imagined what the end result would look like taking in to account technique and darkroom elements in a final print; he called this visualisation and I use this technique when taking my photos. Ansel’s mentor was Stieglitz and in his life had much involvement in the environmental political movement, he also has involvement with many artists including Marie Consindas whose forte was using colour, and unlike Ansel who until later in his life found that colour could never be realistic; colour is a departure from reality when successful and distortion when it fails. Yet later on in Ansel’s career he believed that enhancements in digital technology could give colour photography the artistic requirements it needed to be as aesthetically pleasing as black and white photography.
In response to Ansel Adams’ photo I decided to take landscape photos using Photoshop techniques to achieve a similar essence of Adams’ photos to evoke emotions thoughts and sensations. I tried to darken the skies and keep a balance between shadows and highlights; I lowered saturations of colour to gain a black and white sensation but still left a tinge of colour as a surreal engagement.
Bibliography-
Text by Edwin Land, David H McAlpin Jon Holmes and Ansel Adams,1974, Ansel Adams Singular Image,. Bulfinch press, United States of America.
Harry M.Callahan, 1993, Ansel Adams in colour, Little brown and company,United States of America.
DVD Reference- Directed by Rick Burns, Ansel Adams. Distributed by PBS Video in 2002.
DVD reference- Directed by Rick Burns, Ansel Adams: A documentary film. Distributed by ABC 11/12/2005.
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