Tag: photography

Ansel Adams

Ansel Adams brought beauty and inspiration to thousands of people. Read his story and how he became such a beloved photographer.

“I tried to keep both arts alive [concert pianist and landscape photographer], but the camera won.  I found that while the camera does not express the soul, perhaps a photograph can!”  ~ Ansel Adams

The Early Years

On February 20, 1902, Ansel Easton Adams was the only child born to Charles Hitchcock Adams and Olive Bray Adams in San Francisco, CA.  His ancestors immigrated from Ireland in the early 1700s and his grandfather was a wealthy timber baron, a business which his father eventually inherited.  It is ironic that Adams detested the timber industry later in life.

Ansel Adams at his Piano

At the age of 4 the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 hit.  The Adams family house made it through the initial quake unscathed, but Adams’ father thought it best if they sit out the aftershocks outside.  A particularly large aftershock caught Adams by surprise, knocking him down.  He landed face down against a brick wall and broke his nose.  A physician suggested that it would be best to wait until Adams matured to set the broken nose.  Later in life, Adams said, “apparently I never matured, as I have yet to see a surgeon about it.”

Adams was a problem child.  He was sickly, sometimes spending as much as a month in bed.  His Aunt Mary gave him books to occupy his time.  One was the Heart of the Sierras which apparently planted an interest in these magnificent mountains in his young mind.

When he started school, he was so rebellious that he got expelled from one school after another.  Finally, when Adams was 12, his father faced the inevitable and withdrew him from school for a year.  A private tutor was hired so that Adams could continue his education.  During his time, he was exposed to the works of the great artists.  This lasted for one year before he returned to Mrs. Kate M. Wilkins Private School where he graduated from the 8th grade on June 8, 1917.

During this time Adams started playing the piano.  At first, he was self-taught but when he was 12, he started receiving lessons.  The discipline of daily practice apparently helped him to gain some control over his disruptive behavior.  Adams commented about that time.  “The change from a hyperactive Sloppy Joe was not overnight, but was sufficiently abrupt to make some startled people ask, ‘What happened?’ I still recall that the Bach Inventions taxed my concentration, especially when a sunny breeze carrying the sound of the ocean stole through the open window.” As he progressed, his passion for the piano continued to grow so that he planned on becoming a world-class concert pianist. 

However, the tide started to change imperceptibly.  In 1916 he persuaded his “Uncle Frank” to take him to Yosemite, a destination that he was inspired to see from the books his aunt had given him while he laid ill in bed.  And at the same time his father gave him is first camera, an Eastman Kodak Brownie box camera.  It was on that trip that he took his first photographs of Yosemite.  He later commented, “The splendor of Yosemite burst upon us, and it was glorious.  There was light everywhere.  A new era began for me.”  That was the first of an annual pilgrimage to Yosemite that would continue throughout his life.  But he still planned on being a concert pianist.

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Edward Weston

“One does not think during creative work, any more than one thinks when driving a car. But one has a background of years – learning, unlearning, success, failure, dreaming, thinking, experience, all this – then the moment of creation, the focusing of all into the moment. So I can make ‘without thought,’ fifteen carefully considered negatives, one every fifteen minutes, given material with as many possibilities. But there is all the eyes have seen in this life to influence me.”  –  Edward Weston

Note:  Not much of Weston’s photographs are in the public domain.  Therefore, I have include links to his more important photographs so you can enjoy them.

Early Life

On March 24, 1886, Edward Henry Weston was born in Highland Park, Illinois into an intellectual family.  His father, Edward B. Weston, was an obstetrician and his mother, Alice J. Brett, was a Shakespearean actress.  His mother died when he was only five years old and little Edward was raised mostly by his sister Mary who was fourteen years old at the time.  Weston called her “May” or “Maisie.  They would develop a close relationship which lasted throughout the years.

His father remarried when Weston was nine but neither he nor his sister got along with their stepmother or stepbrother.

When Weston was 11, Mary married and relocated from the Midwest to Southern California, settling in Tropico (later renamed to Glendale).  Once Mary left, Weston’s father devoted most of his time to his new wife and her son.  He had no interest in books or school and dropped out.  He also had a lot of time on his hands and spent it mostly by himself in his room.

In 1902, while on vacation on a farm in Michigan, his father gave him his first camera, a Kodak Bulls-Eye No. 2 for his 16th birthday.  His dad included a note which read in part, “you’ll not have to change anything about the Kodak. Always have the sun behind or to the side—never so it shines into the instrument. Don’t be too far from the object you wish to take, or it will be very small. See what you are going to take in the mirror. You can only take twelve pictures, so don’t waste any on things of no interest.”

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Gertrude Käsebier

The remarkable life of Gertrude Käsebier, considered by many to be the greatest portrait photographer of her time.

Portrait by Adolf de Meyer circa 1900

She deferred her career that would bring her international fame until her three children were adolescents.  She entered the prestigious Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York at the age of 37 to study portrait painting.  At the age of 45 she opened her own portrait studios and in just three years she was considered by some to be the greatest photographer in the United States.  Here is her remarkable story.

The Early Years

Gertrude Stanton was born on May 18, 1852 in Fort Des Moines, Iowa, later to be known simply as Des Moines.  Her parents were John W. Stanton and Muncy Boone Stanton. 

n 1858 the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush erupted and in 1859, Gertrude’s father moved to the Colorado Rocky Mountains.  He ventured by himself to Eureka Gulch to try his luck.  He realized that hunting for gold was a hit-and-miss proposition but providing lumber for the building boom that would surely develop was a sure thing.  He built a sawmill and was right.  A year later, John brought his family west to live with him.  The town of Eureka Gulch was renamed Golden and became the capital of the Colorado Territory.  John was well liked and was elected Golden’s first mayor.  Many of Gertrude’s playmates in Golden were American Indians and her contact with them resulted in a deep regard for them and would be the heart of some of the most beautiful and moving portraits.

In 1864 the effects of the Civil War were felt in the Colorado Territory and John thought that it had become too dangerous for his family, so they moved back to the East Coast and settled in Brooklyn, New York.  There John worked in mineralogy and Muncy rented out rooms in their home to boarders to earn a little extra money.  Gertrude was already showing an interest in art, even at an early age.  She removed some of their paintings from the wall, placed them flat on the floor and knelt next to them, pouring over them, examining every detail with the intent of understanding how she could to that.

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Edward Steichen

A brief biography of Edward Steichen, one of the most influential pioneers of photography on whose shoulders we stand.

 

“It is rather amusing, this tendency of the wise to regard a print which has been locally manipulated as irrational photography – this tendency which finds an esthetic tone of expression in the word faked. A MANIPULATED print may be not a photograph. The personal intervention between the action of the light and the print itself may be a blemish on the purity of photography. But, whether this intervention consists merely of marking, shading and tinting in a direct print, or of stippling, painting and scratching on the negative, or of using glycerine, brush and mop on a print, faking has set in, and the results must always depend upon the photographer, upon his personality, his technical ability and his feeling. BUT long before this stage of conscious manipulation has been begun, faking has already set in. In the very beginning, when the operator controls and regulates his time of exposure, when in dark-room the developer is mixed for detail, breadth, flatness or contrast, faking has been resorted to. In fact, every photograph is a fake from start to finish, a purely impersonal, unmanipulated photograph being practically impossible. When all is said, it still remains entirely a matter of degree and ability.” – Edward Steichen

In Luxembourg, a small country wedged between Germany, Belgium and France, is the little known Clervaux Castle secluded in the north of the country. It was built in the 12th century but destroyed in the Battle of the Bulge in the Second World War. Since then it has been restored and now houses the town’s administrative offices and a small museum.

The museum contains an exhibition of over 500 photographs collected from photographers in 36 countries that were assembled and first shown in 1955 at the New York Museum of Modern Art. Since its first showing, the exhibition has traveled around the world and has been seen by more than 9 million people. Finally, it was donated to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and reached its permanent home in the Castle.

00070138-01Éduard Jean Steichen was born on March 27, 1879 to Jean-Pierre and Marie Kemp Steichen in Bivange, Luxembourg. He was still a toddler when his parents moved to the United States and settled in Hancock located in Michigan’s upper peninsula where his father worked in the copper mines. When his father became incapacitated, they moved to Milwaukee. There his mother supported the family by working as a milliner.

He attended Pio Nono College, a Catholic boys’ high school when he was 15 and was already showing artistic talent in his drawings. But before finishing high school, he dropped out to become a lithography apprentice at the American Fine Art Company of Milwaukee. He continued drawing and took up painting. In 1895 at the age of 16 he bought his first camera, a secondhand Kodak box “detective” camera. Together with several of his friends who also enjoyed photography, they pooled their money to rent a small room in a Milwaukee office building and formed the Milwaukee Art Students League.

Steichen continued drawing and painting, but he also took to photography for which he obviously had an eye. The first showing of his photographs, at the age of 20, was at the Philadelphia Photographic Salon in 1899. In 1900 Steichen exhibited his photographs in the Chicago Salon. It is there that Clarence H. White, one of the leading proponents of Pictorialist photography and a colleague of the legendary Alfred Stieglitz, saw his photographs and was greatly impressed. He decided he had to introduce Steichen to the Stieglitz in New York, the photographer whose lifelong obsession was to establish photography as a legitimate art and the driving force behind the Pictorialist movement in America. White wrote a letter to Stieglitz, telling him of his find. Stieglitz was interested.

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Making a Photograph – Taking Flight

Follow all the decisions and resulting adjustments that went into the making of an expressive landscape photograph using Lightroom Classic.

A Desert Scene

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This image was taken in 20 Mule Team Canyon in Death Valley National Park. I was particularly excited about this when I saw it in the field. I was fascinated by the meandering dry stream bead that worked its way across the scene. The ever-present salt in Death Valley stood out white against the soft warm colors of the badlands behind it.

But there were several additional things that excited me. The badlands behind the stream bed also fascinated me and made the experience even richer. It is a concentration of diagonal lines, textures and forms. And the light, while the sun is fairly high in the morning sky, still crosses the badlands at an angle that accentuates its shadows. I intentionally clip_image005overexposed the image 2/3 of a stop to be sure to capture shadow detail and that’s why it looks washed out.

The histogram shows no particular challenges. There is no highlight or shadow clipping. You can see from the thin tail that moves towards the right edge, which was caused by the white salt, doesn’t quite touch it. If I had increased the exposure even a third of a stop more, there would have had highlight clipping on the salt.

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Modernism Changes Photography

Photography finally stands on its own as a legitimate, independent art form.

The Pictorialist movement was born among photographers who were primarily scientists. They fervently believed that photography was not limited to faithfully recording the physical world. They saw the camera as more than a mere mechanical device and they were intent on proving it could create art.

It’s not surprising that they turned for guidance to paintings. If a photograph was to be regarded as art, what better way than to make a photograph that looked like a painting. And besides, painters had already worked out the principles and standards for art over centuries. Why try to invent something new when there was such a wealth of knowledge and tradition at one’s disposal.

If one was so inclined, one could mark the beginning of the Pictorialist movement in 1869 when Henry Peach Robinson used the word in his book Pictorial Effects in Photography…, although the tradition had already taken root. This approach of employing well established standards of painting to photographs had a powerful following that lasted for nearly 100 years.

The Influence of Modernism

At the same time, Modernism was beginning to sweep across Europe in the late 19th century. In many ways, Modernism was the antithesis of the Pictorialist movement. Instead of sanctifying tradition, Modernism rejected it in its entirety. It was utter rebellion against the sensibilities of the establishment. Modernism permeated science, mathematics, philosophy, politics, the economy, literature, psychology and painting.

The Modernist movement was triggered by advances of technology. As if out of nowhere, technology was changing people’s lives. Tasks that were tedious and time-consuming became effortless. Technology was ushering in luxury and leisure time that was available to the masses. It promised a utopian way of life.

But it also shattered self-esteem and feelings of self-worth for many. Rather than a person taking pride from creating a product from start to finish, assembly lines reduced an individual’s contribution to one small, insignificant component.

In the realm of painting, the rejection of tradition was so entrenched that even as new, exciting movements were born, they were quickly discarded in favor of even newer movements. There was a rapid succession of isms: secessionism, fauvism, expressionism, cubism, futurism, constructivism, dada, and surrealism. Painters rejected the traditional notion that art had to be a realistic depiction of nature, people and society.

So, it’s not surprising that with all of this going on, Modernism infiltrated photography.

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In the Beginning There Was a Camera but No Film

Read how photography took off in the mid-1800s when its pioneers developed light-sensitive materials that were capable of captureing an image.

At the heart of photography is the camera, a device that uses lenses to focus the image, a variable aperture to control the brightness of the light and a shutter that can open and close in a precise duration of time. The other component is a light-sensitive medium to capture the image.

In the early 1800’s when much effort went into developing a light-sensitive medium, the camera was nothing new. The camera obscura had existed for centuries. In fact, there’s a high likelihood that you have created a camera obscura.

When there is a solar eclipse it is too dangerous to look directly at the sun without looking through very dark sunglasses. As an alternative, we take a piece of cardboard, punch a hole in it, and project the image of the sun on the sidewalk. As the moon consumes the sun, the projected image shows the image of the crescent sun.

Shining light through a small whole is the principle of the camera obscura. If the light shines on a screen, an upside-down image appears.

The Chinese understood this principle as early as the 4th century BCE knew when they created a sundial with a small hole in the gnomon, the sail-like piece that casts it’s moving shadow on the plate. The hole projected a bright spot on the plate which enabled the Chinese to not only tell the time from the position of the shadow but also the date from the position of the bright spot.

The camera obscura was used to study optics and astronomy in the 16th century. But by 1567, the camera obscura was being used by painters as a drawing aid.

Time passed until explorations into light-sensitive materials in the early 1800s began to produce results.

 

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Gestalt

Incorporating gestalt into your landscape photographs.

From time to time the term ‘Gestalt’ has come up in articles and classes on composition.  I never quite grasped the concept.  I thought Gestalt is an approach some psychologists use in their counseling. And to make matters even more confusing, the origin of the term didn’t help.  It comes from the German word that means ‘shape.’  It just wasn’t sinking in.  Until recently….

 

The concept started to make sense as I was preparing the Mastering Landscape Photography class for the Joshua Tree National Park Desert Institute here in California.  In this course I take a deep dive into light and composition.  I’ve been studying the ‘rules’ of composition for many years now and the authors tend to make broad generalizations on the effect they have on the viewers.  More recently I studied the impact colors have, not from the perspective of visual arts but rather from the studies performed by researchers in psychology.  Through their studies, the researchers found that the colors they studied, generally prime colors, can have either a positive or negative effect on their subjects. And the effect depended on many factors but based on these factors they were consistent.  That got me thinking. 

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Photography as Art – A Brief History

A brief history of photography as art from its beginning in the mid 1800s to the impact of computational photography and artificial intelligence.

Back in the mid 1800s photography was just born.  New advances were made in rapid order.  All those that saw the amazing photographs were struck with their realism.  Painters who made their livings from portraits saw their businesses shrink virtually overnight, replaced by the camera. 

It was the realism that separated the photograph from the other visual arts.  The generally accepted idea was that photographs could never be art.  And yet, some photographers took exception with that.  They contended that photographs can be art and they borrowed techniques from painters to prove it.  In England, Henry Peach Robinson published his ground-breaking book in 1869, Pictorial Effect in Photography: Being Hints On Composition And Chiaroscuro For Photographers, that powerfully and effectively not only made the case for photography as an art form but provide guidelines on how to accomplish that end.  Pictorialism became a movement that swept European photographers and, in the United States, had Alfred Stieglitz as its most influential proponent and promoter. Even Ansel Adams had his Pictorialism period.

While pictorialism was many things, one of the defining qualities was a soft focus to reproduce the effect generally seen with paint on canvas.  Composite images made from more than one negative were also very common and well accepted, even demanded.  But the main intent was to create photographs that went beyond realism and elicited an emotional response in the viewer.

Photography continued to evolve as an art form along with Modernism and the social and intellectual movement it spawned.  Group f/64, founded by William Van Dyke and Ansel Adams in the San Francisco area, rejected the notion that fine art photography must have a soft focus.  Adams, upon meeting with Stieglitz in New York, convince him that photographs of the natural world that were in sharp focus were also art. 

Not only that, but Adams also developed the Zone system that brought a high degree of precision and accuracy, providing photographers with great control through the interpretive decisions they made in each step of the photographic process.  One can get insights into the numerous decisions from Adams’ insightful book Examples: the making of 40 photographs.  The path shaped by each decision they made took them to the final print and what they visualized it would convey.  Each photographer was in complete control of the entire process.

Eventually Kodak and other film companies took over the development and printing part of the process.  This removed the investment individuals would have to make not only in the needed equipment, chemicals and time but also the knowledge and experience required to make the decisions that led to the final print. On the one hand, photographers lost control of a good part of the process but on the other hand the masses gained access to this wonderful new technology and the benefits it provided. They delivered the undeveloped film to the lab or the neighborhood photo store and a few days later received the developed negatives and prints.

Exposure was hit and miss for the general population.  The professional and serious enthusiasts used light meters to calculate their exposures.  But the general public just guessed although in many cases their cameras didn’t give them any control over exposure.  It was only a matter of time, however, before camera manufacturers would incorporate light meters in the camera itself.  The first one I ever saw had a gauge with a needle on the top of the body that would move back and forth as the aperture and/or shutter speed was adjusted.  The idea was to line up the needle with the mark in the middle.   The same decisions used with the light meter were essentially incorporated into the camera. Continue reading “Photography as Art – A Brief History”

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Photographing the Redwoods

Photographing the coastal redwoods of Northern California is both rewarding and challenging. Explore some of the conditions you will face and how best to capture them.

Walking among the redwoods is an inspirational experience. But wait, if we’re talking about the redwoods in California, the trees I am thinking about could be 600 miles from the trees that are conjured up in your mind’s eye. That’s because there are two species of redwoods in California – the massive giants found in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the tall ones that hug 450 miles of the fog-shrouded California coast, culminating in the Redwoods National and State Parks of Northern California. While both species are spectacular, each is unique in its own way and photographing them presents dramatically different challenges and opportunities. In this post, I will be taking you through the Coastal Redwoods of Northern California.

The Redwoods National Park was established in 1968. California had already created three state parks, beginning in the 1920s, that encompassed some of the remaining redwood old growth groves – Jedediah Smith, Del Norte Coast and Prairie Creek.  The two park systems were joined in 1994 to create the Redwoods National and State Parks.  Now 139,000 acres of the Northern California coast are under the joint management and protection of the National Park Service and the California Department of Parks and Recreation.

Being along the Northern California coast, temperatures are moderate throughout the year and moisture is plentiful, not only from winter storms but also from life-giving fogs that roll in year-round from the Pacific Ocean.

Fog is an ever-present possibility in the groves and presents unique challenges and opportunities. The light in the groves is soft and delicate and contrasts and, tp some extent, masks the strength and power of the trees. This light is perfect for capturing this more delicate mood of the redwoods. Slightly overexposed images best capture the lite airiness of the fog.  Compositions with strong foregrounds enhance the feeling of depth created by the fog.

Castles in the fog
‘Castles’ in the fog

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