Career and Adulthood

A meeting with photographer Paul Strand in 1930 helped fix Adams on the course of photography and help to finally break with ideas of being a pianist. In 1933 he traveled to New York to meet Alfred Stieglitz a photographer that Adams admired enormously and with whom he was to develop a deep and intense relationship. Adams had his first New York exhibition in 1933 and with the aid of Stieglitz Adams put on a one-man show in New York in 1936

Zone System
In the 1940's Adams developed his zone system, a highly
complex system - much copied, rarely mastered - of controlling and relating exposure and development. The Zone System provides photographers with a systematic method of precisely defining the relationship between the way they visualize the photographic subject and the final results. His technical mastery is legendary. More than any other photographer before or since he could control the theory and practice of exposure of the negative, of the wet chemistry of development and also of the composition of the photograph. Adams always used "large format" cameras for his photographs, the pin-sharp realism advocated by his approach to capturing images and also by the f/64 group meant that only large negatives could deliver the necessary quality of image. His equipment look very Victorian and old-fashioned. Large format cameras are physically large and heavy, require a substantial tripod, take time to set up and set a limitation on how many pictures can be taken on account of the physically large size, bulk and not to mention cost of the negatives. A single 10" by 8" negative that Adams exposed to capture his famous "Moonrise Hernandez" picture for instance has an area almost 60 times larger than a standard 35mm negative. With a smaller format camera an image is the work of seconds and instantly repeatable. With large format the setting up and preparation takes much longer and a Adams would sometimes wait for hours or even days to capture a scene waiting while the lighting and the elements of the

view fell into exactly the right position. Another result of using large format equipment meant that Adams could work individually on a particular negative, aiding his "visualization" of an image and bringing it to a real print. Such large negatives blown up to 30" x 40" would require only a 4 times magnification as opposed to 28 times for a standard 35mm negative.

F/64 Group
Group f/64 was created when photographer Willard Van Dyke and Ansel Adams decided to organize some of their fellow photographers for the purposes of promoting a common aesthetic principle. The term f/64 refers to a small aperture setting on a large format camera, which secures great depth of field, rendering a photograph evenly sharp from foreground to background.

Friends of photography
Goal was to promote creative photography and support its practitioners. Held various art shows to showcase work of budding photographers. After Adams's death in 1984, the organization moved to San Francisco where the Ansel Adams Center for Photography opened in 1989

Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico He saw the moon over the valley and stopped the car jumping out and yelling, "Grab the tripod! Grab the camera! Hurry! We don't have a lot of time!"

One of Ansels last masterpieces was Moon and Half Dome, made in his soul's home, Yosemite. He wrote a delightful description of the experience in his autobiography,

"I was driving a bit aimlessly around the valley one winter afternoon, when I clearly saw an image in my mind's eye of Half Dome as the moon rose over its right shoulder. I parked my car and with my Hasselblad and tripod firmly positioned across my shoulder, I strode over the snowy field until I found the place that best revealed the scene."

Oak Tree, Snowstorm Yosemite National Park, California