Ansel Adams: Hero for the National Parks System

Ansel Adams' photographs are ubiquitous in America. Doctor's offices, banks, libraries, any place that needs classy decor at a reasonable price is likely to have one. Yet his work has not sucumbed to the triteness that such over exposed work often does. The eye does not tire of Ansel Adams' photgraphs, nor do the black and white master pieces blend into the background, offering only visual white noise.

Several years back the North Carolina Museum of Art had an extensive show with his work. I learned that there is a lot more to know about Adams than his pictures. If you ever have a chance to view an exhibit,. go. Take the time to read the narratives that will accompany his work.

There are approximately 400 parks that make up the National Parks System. Yosemite was the first area set aside in 1872, but there was no real attempt at a system until 1916 when Woodrow Wilson signed the papers creating the Organic Act. The road to making and keeping the National Parks System has been as rocky as some of the terrain in the great Western Parks .

Most of us are aware of recent attempts to drill for oil in pristine park land. Throughout the years there have been developers who wanted the land for all sorts of things. Some have been granted permission to build hotels, but the land has remained generally pure.

Sarah Palin is not the first politician from a wilderness state who has held the wilderness in less than awe. When people grow up with beauty, they tend to take it for granted. And of course, most of the Congressmen from the Midwest, South and East had never been out West.

Those who fought to protect these lands from developers, saving it for you and I, found the photographs of Ansel Adams. Those of us who have grown up seeing his work can only imagine what it must have been like to see these pictures for the first time. They had never seen the land; when their first exposure to it was the pictures of Ansel Adams, they were truly awe struck. Ansel Adams' photos were instrumental in changing their votes to saving the parks, even making more.

We owe so much to Adams. We not only have his amazing photographs to admire, but we have the National Parks System, in part, because of his work.

We can take fairly decent pictures with our 2 ounce cell phones. I am sure that Ansel Adams would have been able to take terrific pictures with our cell phones.

We have to remind ourselves that he was using a huge box camera that had to stand on a heavy tripod and required other equipment. His habit was to take one picture, take it back to his dark room and develop it. No repeating or deleting things until he got what he wanted.

It was common for him to take hours to set up a picture, to get that one chance at perfection. However, his assistants recall him driving along, suddenly stopping, getting out of the car and shooting a master piece.

That was the Ansel Adams intuition. He had the technical skills, but his intuition, his soul, if you will, was what made it possible for him to spend hours or minutes getting that perfect picture!

"The Zone System is a photographic technique for determining optimal film exposure and development, formulated by Ansel Adams and Fred Archer in 1941. 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. Although it originated with black and white sheet film, the Zone System is also applicable to roll film, both black and white and color, negative and reversal, and to digital photography."

Those interested in technology should follow this link: The Zone System

I hope you let me know wrhat you think of the lens. Stars are always welcome.