ActionScript-ToolBox: by Ansel Adams

ActionScript ToolBox
Quotes, Bios, and more!

Browse by:

Ansel Adams (Biography)

(0.13 seconds)

Other authors named Ansel:

Author's popularity: 4
Vote:

If you like or dislike this author in general or one or more of their quotes in particular, please give us your feedback by clicking on the

icon to vote for, or the

icon to vote against them.

Popularity: 17 Vote:	A good photograph is knowing where to stand.
Popularity: 13 Vote:	A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.
Popularity: 10 Vote:	A photograph is usually looked at - seldom looked into.
Popularity: 12 Vote:	A true photograph need not be explained, nor can it be contained in words.
Popularity: 6 Vote:	Both the grand and the intimate aspects of nature can be revealed in the expressive photograph. Both can stir enduring affirmations and discoveries, and can surely help the spectator in his search for identification with the vast world of natural beauty and the wonder surrounding him.
Popularity: 2 Vote:	Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships.
Popularity: 17 Vote:	I am probably afraid that some spectator will not understand my photography - therefore I proceed to make it really less understandable by writing defensibly about it.
Popularity: 3 Vote:	I know some photographs that are extraodrinary in their power and conviction, but it is difficult in photography to overcome the superficial power or subject; the concept and statement must be quite convincing in themselves to win over a dramatic and compelling subject situation.
Popularity: 13 Vote:	I tried to keep both arts alive, but the camera won. I found that while the camera does not express the soul, perhaps a photograph can!
Popularity: 12 Vote:	In my mind's eye, I visualize how a particular... sight and feeling will appear on a print. If it excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph. It is an intuitive sense, an ability that comes from a lot of practice.
Popularity: 6 Vote:	In some photographs the essence of light and space dominate; in others, the substance of rock and wood, and the luminous insistence of growing things. It is my intention to present-through the medium of photography-intuitive observations of the natural world which may have meaning to spectators.
Popularity: 11 Vote:	In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration.
Popularity: 12 Vote:	It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.
Popularity: 2 Vote:	It is my intention to present - through the medium of photography - intuitive observations of the natural world which may have meaning to the spectators.
Popularity: 9 Vote:	Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer - and often the supreme disappointment.
Popularity: 8 Vote:	Millions of men have lived to fight, build palaces and boundaries, shape destinies and societies; but the compelling force of all times has been the force of originality and creation profoundly affecting the roots of human spirit.
Popularity: 14 Vote:	Myths and creeds are heroic struggles to comprehend the truth in the world.
Popularity: 10 Vote:	Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.
Popularity: 9 Vote:	Notebook. No photographer should be without one!
Popularity: 12 Vote:	Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art.
Popularity: 9 Vote:	Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution.
Popularity: 15 Vote:	Simply look with perceptive eyes at the world about you, and trust to your own reactions and convictions. Ask yourself: "Does this subject move me to feel, think and dream? Can I visualize a print - my own personal statement of what I feel and want to convey - from the subject before me?
Popularity: 16 Vote:	Some photographers take reality...and impose the domination of their own thought and spirit. Others come before reality more tenderly and a photograph to them is an instrument of love and revelation.
Popularity: 7 Vote:	Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter.
Popularity: 11 Vote:	The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways.
Popularity: 9 Vote:	There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.
Popularity: 8 Vote:	There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.
Popularity: 7 Vote:	There are worlds of experience beyond the world of the aggressive man, beyond history, and beyond science. The moods and qualities of nature and the revelations of great art are equally difficult to define; we can grasp them only in the depths of our perceptive spirit.
Popularity: 9 Vote:	There is nothing worse than a brilliant image of a fuzzy concept.
Popularity: 3 Vote:	There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.
Popularity: 8 Vote:	There's nothing worse than a brilliant image of a fuzzy concept.
Popularity: 6 Vote:	These people live again in print as intensely as when their images were captured on old dry plates of sixty years ago... I am walking in their alleys, standing in their rooms and sheds and workshops, looking in and out of their windows. Any they in turn seem to be aware of me.
Popularity: 13 Vote:	To photograph truthfully and effectively is to see beneath the surfaces and record the qualities of nature and humanity which live or are latent in all things.
Popularity: 10 Vote:	Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.
Popularity: 9 Vote:	We must remember that a photograph can hold just as much as we put into it, and no one has ever approached the full possibilities of the medium.
Popularity: 9 Vote:	When I'm ready to make a photograph, I think I quite obviously see in my minds eye something that is not literally there in the true meaning of the word. I'm interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without.
Popularity: 5 Vote:	When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.
Popularity: 7 Vote:	Yosemite Valley, to me, is always a sunrise, a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space.
Popularity: 8 Vote:	You don't take a photograph, you make it.

Biography

Ansel Easton Adams (February 20,1902 – April 22, 1984) was an American photographer born in San Francisco.

Famous for his black & white landscape photographs of the national parks (Yosemite National Park among others), and as an author of numerous books about photography, including his trilogy of technical instruction manuals (The Camera, The Negative and The Print). He co-founded the photographic association Group f/64 along with other masters like Edward Weston, Willard Van Dyke, Imogen Cunningham and others.

He invented the zone system, a technique which allows photographers to translate the light they see into specific densities on negatives and paper, thus giving them better control over finished photographs. Adams also pioneered the idea of visualization (which he often called 'previsualization', though he later acknowledged that term to be a redundancy) of the finished print based upon the measured light values in the scene being photographed.

Life

His Aunt Mary gave him a copy of "In the Heart of the Sierras" (http://www.yosemite.ca.us/history/in_the_heart_of_the_sierras/) when he was sick as a child. The photographs in the book by George Fiske piqued his interest enough to persuade his parents to vacation in Yosemite National Park in 1916, where he was given a camera as a gift.

Adams disliked the uniformity of the education system and left school in 1915 to educate himself. He originally trained himself as a pianist, but Yosemite and the camera diverted his interest toward photography. He later met his future wife, Virginia Best, in Yosemite. Adams long alternated between a career as a concert pianist and one as a photographer.

At age 17 Adams joined the Sierra Club, a group dedicated to preserving the natural world's wonders and resources. He remained a member thorughout his lifetime and served as a director, as did his wife, Virginia. Adams was an avid mountaineer in his youth and participated in the club's annual "high trips", and was later responsible for several first ascents in the Sierra Nevada. It was at Half Dome in 1927 that he first found that he could make photographs that were, in his own words, "...an austere and blazing poetry of the real". Adams became an environmentalist, and his photographs are a record of what many of these national parks were like before human intervention and travel. His work has promoted many of the goals of the Sierra Club and brought environmental issues to light.

Photographs in Adams' limited edition book, Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail, along with his testimony, are credited with helping secure the designation of Sequoia and Kings Canyon as national parks in 1940.

During World War Two Adams worked on creating epic photographic murals for the Department of the Interior. Adams was distressed by the Japanese American Internment that occurred after the Pearl Harbor attack. He was given permission to visit the Manzanar War Relocation Center in the Owens Valley, at the foot of Mount Williamson. The resulting photo-essay first appeared in a Museum of Modern Art exhibit, and later was published as Born Free and Equal: Photographs of the loyal Japanese-Americans at Manzanar Relocation Center, Inyo County, California.

Adams was the recipient of three Guggenheim fellowships during his career. He was elected in 1966 a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1980 Jimmy Carter awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.

Publishing rights for the Adams' photographs are handled by the trustees of The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust.

The Minarets Wilderness in the Inyo National Forest was renamed the Ansel Adams Wilderness in 1984 in his honor. Mount Ansel Adams, a 11,760' peak in the Sierra Nevada, was named for him in 1985.

...(more on Wikipedia)

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Ansel Adams".

About Us