I love the work of Ansel Adams. His work reaches the level of any master artist from the Impressionist Era. The difference being he embraced the clarity of photography in black and white instead of the blending of the oils and the bold abstract brush strokes of the Impressionists. For me color would limit his photographs. It would lock you into seeing the picture one way. The black and white frees you to see the pictures as shapes, shadows, and tones. Then you imagine without thinking about it what the colors would be, similar to your imagination filling in the life of a novel while reading a good one. 

Countless photographers, some great, have come and gone since Adams made the most iconic images of stone and sky. One of my favorite photographers, Galen Rowell who died in an airplane accident near Bishop, CA in 2002, has faded. His website is gone. His books are out of print. It makes me sad because he was brilliant at showing how visualization and the creative process work together while making photographs. His written voice whispers in my mind every time I’m doing landscape photography. 

A few years ago during a hike in Buckskin Gulch in southern Utah I came across this scene of the cracked mud next to the sandstone. The light was bouncing down through the very narrow canyon to give it some nice warm side lighting. 

Ansel Adams’ photograph “Rock and Water, Sierra Nevada, California, c. 1934”* instantly popped into my mind when this scene presented itself. Of course Adams picture is about a thousand times better, but the important thing, for me, is the fact that it came to mind and influenced my picture. For me it was the continuing cracking of the mud mirroring the cracking of the stone for my picture and the mirroring of the stone in the water with the shapes hidden in the water for his. So he has three things going on and I have two. Except I have the interesting light.

His picture resembles the Impressionist paintings with the big, bold shapes in abstract. Then when looking at and into the picture you start to see the reflection and the shapes under the water. So instead of just looking at it and moving on to the next picture, you have to look at it and then really look at it. A person could take a gummy and listen to Pink Floyd all day while looking at this picture.

The lesson I take from seeing his picture before seeing my picture is an example of memory mixed with visualization then made into a picture of a teeny tiny bit of Buckskin Gulch. Getting to the point of letting the work of the masters instantly influence your own work takes a long time. Study and practice over and over again until you can imagine and create instantly. 

This is good help for my wedding photography and portrait photography work. I usually look through a folder I call the “Swipe Folder” of better photographers than me before a wedding. Filling the swipe folder are the pictures these people have done that inspire me. They’re usually pictures I might not think of making. The pictures these people take I would already do don’t inspire me as much. It’s always what’s better and outside my usual envelope of ideas that inspires me to be better and try new ideas. 

Ansel Adams inspires me in the same way. He has inspired and will continue to inspire landscape photographers for many more generations.