Ansel Adams

Ansel Adams was a photographer and an environmentalist born in 1902 in San Francisco, California. Adams found a love of nature at a young age. Adams spent substantial time at Yosemite National Park every year from 1916 until his death. He hiked, climbed, and explored, gaining self-esteem and self-confidence. When Adams was twelve he taught himself to play the piano and read music.
1927 was the pivotal year of Adams's life. He made his first fully visualized photograph, Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, and took his first High Trip. More important, he came under the influence of Albert M. Bender, a San Francisco insurance magnate and patron of arts and artists. Literally the day after they met, Bender set in motion the preparation and publication of Adams' first portfolio, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras. Adams eventually served as principal photographic consultant to Polaroid and Hasselblad and, informally, to many other photographic concerns.
Adams's technical mastery has become that of a legend. More than any creative photographer, before or since, he reveled in the theory and practice of the medium. Adams developed the famous and highly complex "zone system" of controlling and relating exposure and development, enabling photographers to creatively visualize an image and produce a photograph that matched and expressed that visualization.
When people thought about the national parks of the Sierra Club or nature of the environment itself, they often envisioned them in terms of an Ansel Adams photograph. His black-and-white images were not "realistic" documents of nature. Instead, they sought an intensification and purification of the psychological experience of natural beauty. He created a sense of the sublime magnificence of nature that infused the viewer with the emotional equivalent of wilderness, often more powerful than the actual thing.

--Cricket