Ansel Adams - American Photographer

Ansel Adams was born on February 20, 1902 in San Francisco. He became one of America's most well-known and beloved photographers during his lifetime. Adams is acclaimed for his detailed black-and-white images of landscapes, especially throughout Yosemite National Park and the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California, but his work actually covers everything from natural landscapes to architectural photos and even shots of Los Angeles freeway interchanges.

His style is stark black-and-white, with an obvious appreciation for shadow, light, and the many nuances these elements can produce in a well constructed photograph. He treats each image as a detailed and extremely sharply focused view from edge to edge, but the most striking thing about his photographs is his obsessive concentration on shadow and light, using natural light to highlight just the trunk of a tree or the sensual curve of a freeway on ramp. Adams was a master of light and darkroom development, and that is the style he developed and is most remembered for during his career as a photographer.

His severe black and white images showed greater depth and detail than other landscape photos of the day, which helped make his work unique and very collectible. He worked all of his own negatives in the darkroom, dodging and burning areas that he wanted to highlight or downplay. He could spend entire days and nights feverishly working until he got his intended results from the negatives.

As he became a more experienced photographer, Adams gradually developed a system for creating and developing his negatives that he called the "Zone System." This system was a scientific system that he used to effectively manipulate the tonality of the photo. A photographer could see an image, and perfectly recreate it in the finished photograph. The system revolutionized the way photographers shot and developed their work, and photographers everywhere began to use the system that is still in use today.

Adams also helped form a ground-breaking photography group, called Group f/64. It was named after the lens aperture that allows the greatest depth of field and detail in photography. The organization only lasted formally about a year, but it made history by encouraging photographers to use detail and to create photography that only celebrated the art of the photograph.

Although Adams died in 1984, his work is still extremely popular today, and it has been reproduced in everything from calendars to posters and coffee table books. He felt deeply about using his photography as art, and totally understanding the medium and its technicalities, in order to produce the best work possible. Some of his most famous works include "Moon and Half Dome," "Sand Dunes - Death Valley," "Nevada Fall, Rainbow," and "Canyon de Chelly."