Ansel Adams “I hope that my work will encourage self expression in others and stimulate the search for beauty and creative excitement in the great world around us.”
Ansel Adams was a photographer and environmentalist who was born in 1902 and passed away in 1984, who was famously known for his black and white landscape photography, most commonly Yosemite National Park. He helped develop the Zone System, which was used to help determine the proper exposure and adjust the contrasting of the final product. He mostly used a large-format camera because they had a higher resolution resulting in sharper images. His photographs are widely produced throughout many calendars, books, and posters.
I believe Ansel Adams is an appealing photographer because he mainly focused on using black and white although he did occasionally use color for his pictures. When he did use color for his pictures he focused on portraits, landscapes and architecture. I find it inspiring that Adams said he could get "a far greater sense of 'color' through a well-planned and executed black and white image than [he had] ever achieved with color photography." He felt that using color could be distracting and could distract an artist from achieving it's full potential with a photograph. Due to developing the Zone System, he believed he was able to master his black and white photography, causing him to dislike using color a little more.