Possibly the best photographer to walk the face of the earth

This is a story about Ansel Easton Adams. possibly the best photographer ever. Ansel Easton Adams was an American photographer and an environmentalist. he is famously known for his blak and white landscape photographs of the american west, especially Yosemite national park have been widely reproduced on calenders, posters and books. with Fred Archer, Ansel Easton Adams developed the Zone system as a way to determine proper exposure and adjust the contrast of the final print. the resulting clarity and depth characterized his photographs. Ansel Easton Adams primarily used large format cameras because their high resolution helped ensure sharpness in his image.
Ansel Easton Adams founded the photography group known as group f/64 along with photographers Willard Van Dyke and Edward Weston.

Ansel Easton Adams was born in the western addition of San Francisco, California, to Charles Hitchcock and Olive Bray Adams. An only child, he was named after his uncle Ansel Easton. his mother's family came from Baltimore. The Adams family came from new England. his parental grandfather founded and built a prosperous lumbar business, which his father later ran, through his father's natural talents lay more with sciences than with business. later is life, Adams would condemn that very dame industry for cutting down many of the great redwood forests.

In 1903, his family moved 2 miles west to a new home near the seacliff neighbourhood, just south of the presido army base. the home had a splendid view of the golden gate and the marine headlands. San Francisco was devastated by the april 18, 1906 earth quake. uninjured in the initial shaking, the four year old Ansel Easton Adams was tossed face first `into a garden wall during an aftershock three hours later, breaking and scarring his nose. Among his earliest memories was watching the smoke from the ensuring fire that destroyed much of the city a few miles to the east. although a doctor recommended that his nose be reset once he reached maturity, Ansel Easton Adams's nose remained crooked his entire life.
Ansel Easton Adams was a hyperactive child and prone to frequent sickness and hypochondria. he had a few friends, but his family home and surroundings on the heights facing the golden gate provided ample childhood activities. although he had no patience for games or sports, the curious child took to the beauty of the nature at an early age, collecting bugs and exploring lobos creek and all the way to baker beach and the sea cliffs leading to lands end.

His father bought a three inch telescope and they enthusiastically shared the hobby of amateur astronomy, visiting the lick observatory on mount hamilton together. his father went on to serve as the paid secretary-treasurer of the astronomical society of the pacific from 1925 to 1950.

After the death of Ansel's grandfather and the aftermath of the panic of 1907, his father;s business suffered great financial losses, some of the induced near-poverty was because Ansel's uncle Ansel Easton and Cedric Wright's father, George Wright, had secretly sold their shares of the company to the hawaiian sugar trust for a large amount of money. by 1912, the family's standard of living dropped sharply. after young Ansel was dismissed from several private school for his restlessness adn inattentiveness, his father decided to pull him out of school in 1915, at the age of 12. Adams was then educated by private tutors, his aunt Mary, and by his father. his aunt was a follower of Robert G Ingersoll, a 19th century agnostic, abolitionist and women's suffrage advocate. as a result of his aunt's influence, Robert's teachings were important to Ansel's upbringing. 

His father raised him to follow the ideas of Ralph Waldo Emerson. "to live a modest, mortal life guided by a social responsibility to man and to nature." Adams had a warm adn supportive relationship with his father, but had a distant relationship with his mother, who did not approve of his interest in photography. the day after his mother's death on 1950, Ansel had a dispute with the undertaker when choosing which casket his mother would be buried in, Ansel chose the cheapest in the room, a $260 casket that seemed the least he could purchase without doing the job himself. when the undertaker remarked, "have you no respect for the dead?" Adams replied, "one more crack like that and i will take mama elsewhere."

Adams became interested in piano at the age 12. Music became the main focus of his youth. his father sent him to a piano teacher MArie Butler, who focused on perfectionism and accuracy. after four years of studying under her guidance, adams moved on to other teachers, one being composer Henry Cowell. for the next twelve years, the piano was Adam's primary occupation and by 1920, his intended profession. although he ultimately gave up music for photography, the piano bought substance, discipline and structure to his frustrating and erratic youth. moreover the careful training and exact craft required of a musician profoundly informed his visual artistry, as well as his influential writings and teachings on photography.

Adams first visited Yosemite National Park in 1916 with his family. He wrote of his first view of the valley: "the splendor of Yosemite burst upon us and it was glorious... One wonder after another descended upon us... There was light everywhere... A new era began for me." His father gave him his first camera, a Kodak Brownie box camera, during that stay and he took his first photographs with his "usual hyperactive enthusiasm".He returned to Yosemite on his own the following year with better cameras and a tripod. In the winter, he learned basic darkroomtechnique working part-time for a San Francisco photo finisher.Adams avidly read photography magazines, attended camera club meetings, and went to photography and art exhibits. With retired geologist and amateur ornithologist Francis Holman, whom he called "Uncle Frank," he explored the High Sierra, in summer and winter, developing the stamina and skill needed to photograph at high elevation and under difficult weather conditions

In 1927, Adams produced his first portfolio, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras, in his new style, which included his famous image Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, taken with his Korona view camera using glass plates and a dark red filter (to heighten the tonal contrasts). On that excursion, he had only one plate left and he "visualized" the effect of the blackened sky before risking the last shot. He later said "I had been able to realize a desired image: not the way the subject appeared in reality but how it felt to me and how it must appear in the finished print". In April 1927, he wrote "My photographs have now reached a stage when they are worthy of the world's critical examination. I have suddenly come upon a new style which I believe will place my work equal to anything of its kind."

With the sponsorship and promotion of Albert Bender, an arts-connected businessman, Adams's first portfolio was a success (earning nearly $3,900) and soon he received commercial assignments to photograph the wealthy patrons who bought his portfolio. Adams also came to understand how important it was that his carefully crafted photos were reproduced to best effect. At Bender's invitation, he joined the Roxburghe Club, an association devoted to fine printing and high standards in book arts. He learned much about printing techniques, inks, design, and layout which he later applied to other projects.Unfortunately, at that time most of his darkroom work was still being done in the basement of his parents' home, and he was limited by barely adequate equipment.

Romantic landscape artists Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moranportrayed the Grand Canyon and Yosemite at the end of their reign, and were subsequently displaced by daredevil photographers Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, and George Fiske.But it was Adams's black-and-white photographs of the West which became the foremost record of what many of the National Parks were like before tourism, and his persistent advocacy helped expand the National Park system. He used his works to promote many of the goals of the Sierra Club and of the nascent environmental movement, but always insisted that, as far as his photographs were concerned, "beauty comes first". His images are still very popular in calendars, posters, and books.

Realistic about development and the subsequent loss of habitat, Adams advocated for balanced growth, but was pained by the ravages of "progress". He stated, "We all know the tragedy of the dustbowls, the cruel unforgivable erosions of the soil, the depletion of fish or game, and the shrinking of the noble forests. And we know that such catastrophes shrivel the spirit of the people... The wilderness is pushed back, man is everywhere. Solitude, so vital to the individual man, is almost nowhere."

Adams co-founded Group f/64 with other masters like Edward Weston,Willard Van Dyke, and Imogen Cunningham. With Fred Archer, he pioneered the Zone System, a technique for translating perceived light into specific densities on negatives and paper, giving photographers better control over finished photographs. Adams also advocated the idea of visualization (which he often called "previsualization", though he later acknowledged that term to be a redundancy) whereby the final image is "seen" in the mind's eye before the photo is taken, toward the goal of achieving all together the aesthetic, intellectual, spiritual, and mechanical effects desired. He taught these and other techniques to thousands of amateur photographers through his publications and his workshops. His many books about photography, including the Morgan & Morgan Basic Photo Series (The Camera, The Negative, The Print, Natural Light Photography, and Artificial Light Photography) have become classics in the field.

In 1966 he was elected 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.

Adams's photograph The Tetons and the Snake River was one of the 115 images recorded on the Voyager Golden Record aboard the Voyager spacecraft. These images were selected to convey information about humans, plants and animals, and geological features of the Earth to a possible alien civilization.

His legacy includes helping to elevate photography to an art comparable with painting and music, and equally capable of expressing emotion and beauty. He told his students, "It is easy to take a photograph, but it is harder to make a masterpiece in photography than in any other art medium."

Adams died on April 22, 1984, in the ICU at the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula in Monterey, California, at the age of 82 fromcardiovascular disease. He was survived by his wife, two children, Michael and Anne, and five grandchildren.

Publishing rights for most of Adams's photographs are now handled by the trustees of The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust. An archive of Ansel Adams's work is located at the Center for Creative Photography(CCP) at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Numerous works by the artist have been sold at auction, including a mural size print of 'CLEARING WINTER STORM, YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK' which sold at Sotheby's New York in 2010 for $722,500, the highest price ever paid for an original Ansel Adams photograph.

John Szarkowski states in the introduction to Ansel Adams: Classic Images (1985, p. 5), "The love that Americans poured out for the work and person of Ansel Adams during his old age, and that they have continued to express with undiminished enthusiasm since his death, is an extraordinary phenomenon, perhaps even unparalleled in our country's response to a visual artist."

                                Source: Wikipedia

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Evolution of Cameras

The history of the camera can be traced much further back than the introduction of photography. Cameras evolved from thecamera obscura, and continued to change through many generations of photographic technology, including daguerreotypes,calotypes, dry plates, film, and digital cameras. 

Camera obscura 

Photographic cameras were a development of the camera obscura, a device possibly dating back to the ancient Chinese and ancient Greeks which uses a pinhole or lens to project an image of the scene outside upside-down onto a viewing surface.

An Arab physicist, Ibn al-Haytham, published his Book of Optics in 1021 AD. He created the first pinhole camera after observing how light traveled through a window shutter. Ibn al-Haytham realized that smaller holes would create sharper images. Ibn al-Haytham is also credited with inventing the first camera obscura.

On 24 January 1544 mathematician and instrument maker Reiners Gemma Frisius of Leuven University used one to watch a solar eclipse, publishing a diagram of his method in De Radio Astronimica et Geometrico in the following year. In 1558 Giovanni Batista della Porta was the first to recommend the method as an aid to drawing.

Before the invention of photographic processes there was no way to preserve the images produced by these cameras apart from manually tracing them. The earliest cameras were room-sized, with space for one or more people inside; these gradually evolved into more and more compact models such as that by Niépce's time portable handheld cameras suitable for photography were readily available. The first camera that was small and portable enough to be practical for photography was envisioned by Johann Zahn in 1685, though it would be almost 150 years before such an application was possible.

Early fixed images 

The first partially successful photograph of a camera image was made in approximately 1816 by Nicéphore Niépce, using a very small camera of his own making and a piece of paper coated with silver chloride, which darkened where it was exposed to light. No means of removing the remaining unaffected silver chloride was known to Niépce, so the photograph was not permanent, eventually becoming entirely darkened by the overall exposure to light necessary for viewing it. In the mid-1820s, Niépce used a sliding wooden box camera made by Parisian opticians Charles and Vincent Chevalier to experiment with photography on surfaces thinly coated with Bitumen of Judea. The bitumen slowly hardened in the brightest areas of the image. The unhardened bitumen was then dissolved away. One of those photographs has survived. 

Daguerrotypes and Calotypes

After Niépce's death in 1833, his partner Louis Daguerre continued to experiment and by 1837 had created the first practical photographic process, which he named the daguerreotype and publicly unveiled in 1839. Daguerre treated a silver-plated sheet of copper with iodine vapor to give it a coating of light-sensitive silver iodide. After exposure in the camera, the image was developed by mercury vapor and fixed with a strong solution of ordinary salt (sodium chloride). Henry Fox Talbot perfected a different process, the calotype, in 1840. As commercialized, both processes used very simple cameras consisting of two nested boxes. The rear box had a removable ground glass screen and could slide in and out to adjust the focus. After focusing, the ground glass was replaced with a light-tight holder containing the sensitized plate or paper and the lens was capped. Then the photographer opened the front cover of the holder, uncapped the lens, and counted off as many seconds—or minutes—as the lighting conditions seemed to require before replacing the cap and closing the holder. Despite this mechanical simplicity, high-quality achromatic lenses were standard.

Kodak and the birth of film

The use of photographic film was pioneered by George Eastman, who started manufacturing paper film in 1885 before switching to celluloid in 1889. His first camera, which he called the "Kodak," was first offered for sale in 1888. It was a very simple box camera with a fixed-focus lens and single shutter speed, which along with its relatively low price appealed to the average consumer. The Kodak came pre-loaded with enough film for 100 exposures and needed to be sent back to the factory for processing and reloading when the roll was finished. By the end of the 19th century Eastman had expanded his lineup to several models including both box and folding cameras.

In 1900, Eastman took mass-market photography one step further with the Brownie, a simple and very inexpensive box camera that introduced the concept of the snapshot. The Brownie was extremely popular and various models remained on sale until the 1960s.

Film also allowed the movie camera to develop from an expensive toy to a practical commercial tool.

Despite the advances in low-cost photography made possible by Eastman, plate cameras still offered higher-quality prints and remained popular well into the 20th century. To compete with roll film cameras, which offered a larger number of exposures per loading, many inexpensive plate cameras from this era were equipped with magazines to hold several plates at once. Special backs for plate cameras allowing them to use film packs or roll film were also available, as were backs that enabled rollfilm cameras to use plates.

Except for a few special types such as Schmidt cameras, most professional astrographs continued to use plates until the end of the 20th century when electronic photography replaced them.

TLRs and SLRs

The first practical reflex camera was the Franke & Heidecke Rolleiflex medium format TLR of 1928. Though both single- and twin-lens reflex cameras had been available for decades, they were too bulky to achieve much popularity. The Rolleiflex, however, was sufficiently compact to achieve widespread popularity and the medium-format TLR design became popular for both high- and low-end cameras.

A similar revolution in SLR design began in 1933 with the introduction of the Ihagee Exakta, a compact SLR which used 127 rollfilm. This was followed three years later by the first Western SLR to use 135 film, the Kine Exakta (World's first true 35mm SLR was Soviet "Sport" camera, marketed several months before Kine Exakta, though "Sport" used its own film cartridge). The 35mm SLR design gained immediate popularity and there was an explosion of new models and innovative features after World War II. There were also a few 35mm TLRs, the best-known of which was the Contaflex of 1935, but for the most part these met with little success.

The first major post-war SLR innovation was the eye-level viewfinder, which first appeared on the Hungarian Duflex in 1947 and was refined in 1948 with the Contax S, the first camera to use a pentaprism. Prior to this, all SLRs were equipped with waist-level focusing screens. The Duflex was also the first SLR with an instant-return mirror, which prevented the viewfinder from being blacked out after each exposure. This same time period also saw the introduction of the Hasselblad 1600F, which set the standard for medium format SLRs for decades.

In 1952 the Asahi Optical Company (which later became well known for its Pentax cameras) introduced the first Japanese SLR using 135 film, the Asahiflex. Several other Japanese camera makers also entered the SLR market in the 1950s, including Canon, Yashica, and Nikon. Nikon's entry, the Nikon F, had a full line of interchangeable components and accessories and is generally regarded as the first Japanese system camera. It was the F, along with the earlier S series of rangefinder cameras, that helped establish Nikon's reputation as a maker of professional-quality equipment.

Arrival of true digital cameras

By the late 1980s, the technology required to produce truly commercial digital cameras existed. The first true portable digital camera that recorded images as a computerized file was likely the Fuji DS-1P of 1988, which recorded to a 2 MB SRAM memory card that used a battery to keep the data in memory. This camera was never marketed to the public.

The first digital camera of any kind ever sold commercially was possibly the MegaVision Tessera in 1987 though there is not extensive documentation of its sale known. The first portable digital camera that was actually marketed commercially was sold in December 1989 in Japan, the DS-X by Fuji The first commercially available portable digital camera in the United States was the Dycam Model 1, first shipped in November 1990. It was originally a commercial failure because it was black and white, low in resolution, and cost nearly $1,000 (about $2000 in 2014). It later saw modest success when it was re-sold as the Logitech Fotoman in 1992. It used a CCD image sensor, stored pictures digitally, and connected directly to a computer for download.

In 1991, Kodak brought to market the Kodak DCS (Kodak Digital Camera System), the beginning of a long line of professional Kodak DCSSLR cameras that were based in part on film bodies, often Nikons. It used a 1.3 megapixel sensor, had a bulky external digital storage system and was priced at $13,000. At the arrival of the Kodak DCS-200, the Kodak DCS was dubbed Kodak DCS-100.

The move to digital formats was helped by the formation of the first JPEG and MPEG standards in 1988, which allowed image and video files to be compressed for storage. The first consumer camera with a liquid crystal display on the back was the Casio QV-10 developed by a team led by Hiroyuki Suetaka in 1995. The first camera to use CompactFlash was the Kodak DC-25 in 1996. The first camera that offered the ability to record video clips may have been the Ricoh RDC-1 in 1995.

In 1995 Minolta introduced the RD-175, which was based on the Minolta 500si SLR with a splitter and three independent CCDs. This combination delivered 1.75M pixels. The benefit of using an SLR base was the ability to use any existing Minolta AF mount lens. 1999 saw the introduction of the Nikon D1, a 2.74 megapixel camera that was the first digital SLR developed entirely from the ground up by a major manufacturer, and at a cost of under $6,000 at introduction was affordable by professional photographers and high-end consumers. This camera also used Nikon F-mount lenses, which meant film photographers could use many of the same lenses they already owned.

Digital camera sales continued to flourish, driven by technology advances. The digital market segmented into different categories, Compact Digital Still Cameras, Bridge Cameras, Mirrorless Compacts and Digital SLRs. One of the major technology advances was the development of CMOS sensors, which helped drive sensor costs low enough to enable the widespread adoption of camera phones.

Source: Wikipedia

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