the times we live in today are radically
different from those of the young Ansel
Adams does it still hold true the art in
nature can be inspirational I believe
there will always be the human need for
affirmation and inspiration of the kind
immortalized by Adams in his photographs
our spirits our own inner beauty spring
from the same source
it sees rocks trees and reflecting
waters tonight we’re going to talk about
a place sort of the different components
about this place the first is the actual
physical geography of it it was
designated one of the first wilderness
areas when the Wilderness Act was passed
most of this wilderness is in the higher
elevation what they call the High Sierra
the second part I wanted to talk about
was the early work of Ansel Adams that’s
associated with this particular area
this was where Ansel Adams developed his
love of nature was an employee with the
Sierra Club and kind of where he
mastered his craft of photography the
third part I wanted to try and show some
of my work how he influenced me this was
a picture that I took in 1977 I had read
a lot of the Ansel Adams basic manuals
and sort of learned a lot about
photography and the love of landscape
photography from reading those Ansel
Adams books and then the fourth part was
obvious the new work that I’ve done this
landscape series this picture I just
took but we’re sort of in a helicopter
hovering over Jun Lake and looking back
and up the snowy part in the back there
is the Ansel Adams wilderness so I just
had a few the color pictures this is the
most remote area in the North Fork of
the San Joaquin River the year that I
was there
almost 50 feet of snow in the mountain
in the foreground there is about Ansel
Adams there’s actually also a mountain
named after him but it’s unique about a
lot of the Ansel Adams wilderness it’s
metamorphic rock there’s this one little
area it’s not the typical granite that
you find a lot of the Sierras and it’s
amazing water the very clean crystal
clear blue water dana lake and the
storms that come from the pacific and
they hit the mountains and form these
afternoon thunderstorms and of course
the waters of the main theme Rainbow
Falls and the forests this is one area
there’s a Aspen’s also a lot of
evergreens so I wanted to give a little
bit of the history of how Ansel Adams
got involved with this area this is a
picture of his father on the left and
mother and Ansel when he was 14 years
old and his aunt this is his first trip
to Yosemite and in his autobiography
Ansel Adams said if he was a kid today
he would be described as a DD child
whatever it was he didn’t do well in
school and his father took him out of
school in the 8th grade and gave him
some private tutoring in bottom of piano
and he gave him some piano lessons and
he took sort of took to that but he also
gave him up a brownie camera and it went
to Yosemite and he kind of fell in love
with the place and by the time he was
about 20 years old he had gotten this
job as a caretaker of the LeConte
memorial which is sort of a stone house
that was sort of the clubhouse of the
Sierra Club in Yosemite Valley it’s
still there and he also started going on
trips he bought his own burro to carry
his camera equipment and that’s kind of
the way they did it back then and he was
one of the early rock climbers the man
on the left is David Brower who was
the longtime head of the Sierra Club and
back then they were kids tennis shoes
and just tied a rope together and they
said if if one a person fell all that
meant is that both of them would die but
say there was no security or AAA it was
pretty precarious ties but this is like
1930s but his job was to sort of be the
logistics person for the summer high
sierra trips they call them and it was
primarily well-to-do businessmen from
san francisco who really liked the
Sierras and they would take a whole
month off and they would come and
basically camp out and the High Sierras
and amazingly Adams would you know take
care of everybody but he would get up
early in the morning and take pictures
and so a lot of the pictures that I’ll
show you were taken actually during
these one-month trips so he came of age
in a era of pictorialism and this
picture was one of his very first it
looks kind of strangely modern now sort
of a selective focus pictorialism was
seen as sort of an imitation of painting
and that’s eventually what people like
Adams our rebelled against we actually
know now that even before that it was
the painters who sort of copied the
camera obscura which is a form of
photography so that’s sort of what
really happened but in this era they
used the lens that induced these
spherical aberrations and made sort of a
soft focus and was seen as sort of
imitation of painting but he soon
switched and this is one of his first
kind of straight pictures and during
this time they used glass plates and the
emulsions were only sensitive to blue
lights so all the skies would turn this
sort of white color and it kind of gave
atmospheric effect but in 1923 they
switched to the emulsions where you
could actually photograph by moonlight
longer exposures and then the big
advance was you could actually
photograph clouds which was
real important part of the Sierras is
afternoon clouds that build up in the
summertime so also it seemed to me in
reading about it there was this big
change sort of in his intellectual
thinking it he went from sort of being
the school brat and to writing things
like this this is when some of his words
from 1923 you said I was climbing the
Long Ridge west of Mount Clark I was
suddenly arrested in the long crunching
path by an exceedingly pointed awareness
of the light I saw more clearly than
I’ve ever seen before or since the minut
detail of the grasses the small float
some of the forests the motion of the
high clouds streaming above the peaks I
dreamed that for a moment time stood
quietly and the vision became but a
shadow of an infinitely greater world so
the other thing I thought was sort of
interesting was he had believed that
dead trees were more expressive than
live ones so it took quite a few
pictures of dead trees this is kind of a
hostile environment when you get into
high elevations so this is a Foxtel pine
may have been dead 400 years or so it
just stays there but he also embraced
not only a rejection of pictorialism but
this embrace of modernism Alfred
Stieglitz had a saying that said art
should be the affirmation of life and
that’s throughout his whole career he
always hung to that that it should be
affirming he also had a belief he called
it extracts he didn’t like with somebody
called this picture abstract he thought
that the role of the photographer was to
extract a part of nature he called it to
make form from shapes he thought all
nature was just shapes and it was up to
the artist to make form out of it and to
extract and so this was sort of a
radical view for the time if you think
of a picture like this compared to the
nineteen
century photographers who are survey
photographers would go out and their job
was mainly to go out west survey take
these pictures and go back east and show
people what was out there but Adams
really bought it you should sort of jekt
your emotional state feelings toward the
environment or toward the landscape
there’s a little bit of a story behind
this picture it’s called the Michael
minaret and one of those well-to-do
hurly Sierra Club members was named
Walter Starr and he had a son who is an
avid climber and he liked to climb so
low and unfortunately he fell to his
death on this Michael minaret and so he
asked Ansel Adams if he would put
together a book of his best pictures of
the John Muir Trail because his son his
dream was to write a guide book of the
John Muir Trail which still exists it’s
called the Stars guide to John Muir
Trail so that was what made this book
happen in 1938 and it’s really the only
book it’s totally written by Ansel Adams
and has 50 of his photographs the book
was sold for $15 at the time which is
quite a bit and there’s only 500 copies
so this whole early work was from the
period of around 1920 to 1938 and then
after that World War 2 came about and
Ansel Adams had this idea that he would
try and do pictures of all the beautiful
places in the America to make people
feel patriotic about their country so he
got a commission called the mural
project and he bought this car which he
called Helios and he instead of he
turned in the burro for the car and got
the large-format eight-by-ten camera and
did a lot of the pictures that he’s
really famous for in some ways they’re a
grander scope I think than the earlier
work he also got a Guggenheim Fellowship
to photograph the National Parks Mount
McKinley probably one of his more famous
clearing winter storm
Yosemite so I kind of moved to the third
part to show you some of my early work
this was a picture that I took in 1975 I
took a photo class when I was a senior
in high school and I had a really good
photography teacher and we actually went
on a field trip up to Yosemite and this
was really one of my first pictures I
was taken I had bought a 4×5 camera with
black and white and I went to Death
Valley because that was another one of
Ansel Adams favorite hangouts and this
was sort of a detail that I tried and I
look at these pictures they’re not
anything that I’ve you know sold or
think of my best work but it really
makes me feel that this was the type of
work that I was originally drawn to the
landscape of the western US so what I
did sort of naively I was just the first
year in college and I only been
photographing for a year or two I wrote
to Ansel Adams and asked if I could come
show him my portfolio up in Carmel and
to my surprise he wrote a letter back
which is I learned it he wrote over a
hundred thousand letters in his life and
he he had a philosophy he always
answered every letter and that anybody
that wanted to come see him could come
at five o’clock he had a cocktail hour
at that time and because as long as he
had his drink and he would talk to you
so I actually went there and he signs
sign my book this was in 1977 and one
thing that I remember from it succinctly
was when he looked at this picture he
said that he thought that I should crop
it differently and he said that it’s
real important along the edges to always
have the clean edges so he said to kind
of go like that it’s a very small
difference but if you look it sort of
makes a little cleaner along the edges
so I think that’s sort of the modernism
eye that he had through all his work and
if you in a young photographer you
really can’t go wrong learning that it’s
kind of like you know learning classical
music or something it’s timeless and his
work sort of stands because he the way
he did his compositions so what happened
after that was I ended up I went to
journalism school at University of
Missouri and was selected as a summer
intern and started doing some stories
for the Geographic and this was one of
the first ones was on the California
desert Protection Act so I felt like
this is back swervin old stomping
grounds a California desert I am trained
as a photojournalist but I’ve used
landscape photography a lot of stories
and this isn’t Grand Canyon there’s not
too many journalists who’s going to have
a background in landscape photographers
it’s a story about Wilderness Act the
wilderness system and this is up in
Alaska up in the Tracy Arm wilderness
and just way up in Devon Island some of
these people go out there to study about
going to Mars and a high elevation
impact crater one of my favorite places
down in Torres del Paine a national park
in Patagonia way down in Tierra del
Fuego this was a story about anniversary
Darwin’s expedition on the Beagle Darwin
went to this Pia Bay and we did a story
about the 40th anniversary of the
National trail system this was aa Sark
Island Trail Fraser Island Australia
Finland Lanka national park as a moon
light that they call the candlelight
spruce this was actually for a story on
the carbon cycle now the carbon in the
calcium carbonate in the shales
so these pictures sort of all had a
journalistic side to them this was a
story by the climate change is in
Switzerland sort of the melting glacier
the bathtub ring
the drying lakepowell can you see the
bathtub ring desert called this Viking
weather because this was Greenland was
getting warmer and it was why the the
Vikings had to leave and it got colder
and I’ve also used it on some
environmental stories story about
hardrock mining this was a Superfund
site water pollution in China even in a
Home Depot parking lot in Baltimore this
is that we’re talking about the non
point source water pollution that runs
off the parking lot into the Chesapeake
Bay and these are depleted uranium
canisters the nuclear waste from Paducah
the oil sands all the scraping of the
boreal forests for the oil and this is
for the drought sort of a landscape of a
marina where there’s no boats or no
water and the Yoho National Park just
the other side of the Rockies from Banff
and Lake Louise so really a great park
in the Canadian Rockies okay so now I
get sort of to the last part just try to
explain a little bit of some of the
creative process about this story that I
went through this was the lead picture
that was in the Geographic article and I
went through kind of a lot of thought
about how to do this how to sort of do a
tribute and sort of show that I had
really been inspired by Ansel Adams but
not sort of copy it or not do what
sometimes it’s called stand in the same
tripod holes as Ansel and stuff like
that so the first thing I had to decide
was where to do it in black-and-white or
color and he shooting digital you have a
raw file and you can make it color or
black and white I really liked the way
the black and white that granite just
seemed to really come out much more
forceful and the sculptural qualities to
me really was the right way to do it but
then I still had the
figure out I didn’t want to do it
exactly like Ansel Adams had shot you
know 75 years ago so I just kind of came
up with this idea of sort of referencing
some of his pictures for people who are
real fans of his work they could look at
it and sort of see that there was a
connection but also see that it was a
little bit more up to date version of it
the other thing I did was a lot of
nature books are divided by the seasons
and we decided to just do it by the type
of scenery that you would see if you
went there just so you’d sort of focus
on instead of just you know the
summertime or a vacation it would be
like you’re looking at certain peaks or
Lakes something these are kind of the
peaks baek’s this again that’s the black
and white Ansel Adams council Adams
what’s called Cabin Lake this was
another one of those that we looked at
in color it was actually taken before
sunrise it was actually sort of flat but
when they’re all the same tone in black
and white it brings out the granite
surprised instance to actually see
little white caps this is up about
10,000 feet maybe about a 30 mile an
hour wind there’s also what’s called the
Sierra high trail it sort of follows the
John Muir Trail which is this 211 mile
trail through the Sierras and someone
came up with an idea to sort of go that
same route but not have any trail and so
this is the part out it’s called Nancy
paths and you actually with your pack
and everything it’s sort of a scramble
to get up there but it had a nice nice
view of the minarets
another thing that Ansel Adams had this
philosophy that climbing to the top of
the mountain you don’t get the best view
and the very bottom of the mountain you
don’t get the best view but you sort of
get the best view part way up and so
that’s what this was sort of about a
third way is one of the meadows these
are trees that have been pushed over by
the heavy snow and a lot of avalanches
that could take place
this is sort of idea I had of
referencing back to some of Adams work
he took pictures of similar subject
matters this is in the water
wilderness area is very important for
the state of California because it the
watershed one side comes all the way
down and ends up being the drinking
water for Los Angeles and the other side
the SAP this is the San Joaquin River
this flows down into the Central Valley
and this is the wire that’s used for the
irrigation this water ends up the 60% of
it ends up watering lawns in Los Angeles
there’s one area on the east side and
actually starts snowing I went there for
the fall colors and the fall colors
weren’t even out yet so I ended up
coming back a little bit later this is
the Sierra juniper and the largest trees
in the wilderness this was shot by
moonlight it’s a kind of picture that
was really only possible with a digital
sensor that’s why I really thought that
digital was the best way to do a story
like this because I think if Ansel Adams
would alive now he would be using the
latest technology I actually always
thought of fall colors as color
photographs but I really more and more
like the way they photograph in black
and white on the right side is sort of
between the orange and the yellow you
get just a slight delineation and the
print since the creek that comes out of
Parker Lake and I did go there in the
winter this was actually when I went on
the fall trip started sledding on those
same aspen trees I think we were the
probably the only people in the
wilderness and this time in February and
we had to do what’s called this
all-terrain skiing which is sort of a
hybrid of cross-country and downhill
skiing and I timed it to go in during a
storm which turned out to be good for
photographs but sort of difficult to
move around
so we saw this this is what they call a
Sierra wave cloud and this kind of means
oh you know when you see it’s about a 50
mile an hour wind up on this mount Lyell
there and I could just barely stand up
taking this picture holding the tripod
down and then it got even worse and then
it got even worse that and this was
about 70 mile an hour winds and we ended
up having to dig a snow cave just
something I had never done and I was
glad I had the people with me too knew
how to do that so we stayed in there for
two nights and I actually just climbed
out long enough to take this pictures
about 50 feet away from the opening of
the snow cave that’s about all we could
go is really like a whiteout conditions
I wanted to see what it looked like
afterwards so when we got back out I
hired a plane and took some pictures
from the air so I wrote it afterward so
I just wanted to read a little bit about
that so the times we live in today are
radically different from those of the
young Ansel Adams who photographed the
Sierra wilderness times were hard in the
1920s and 1930s but Americans believed
that things would get better and
progress would come technology was seen
as a way to make life more comfortable
and exciting artists devoted to
modernism focused on form is the
ultimate expression Alfred Stieglitz
summed it up by saying that art should
be the affirmation of life Adams agreed
and he also believed that man could live
in harmony with nature so what are we to
make of Ansel Adams in our era of
cynicism does it still hold true that
art in nature can be inspirational I
believe there will always be the human
need for affirmation and inspiration of
the kind immortalized by Adams in his
Sierra photographs our spirits our own
inner beauty spring from the same source
as these rocks trees and reflecting
waters
it has not even been a century since
Ansel Adams carried his camera on a
burro along the trails of the Sierra
high country in the world of nature that
was only yesterday thang
Oh
different from those of the young Ansel
Adams does it still hold true the art in
nature can be inspirational I believe
there will always be the human need for
affirmation and inspiration of the kind
immortalized by Adams in his photographs
our spirits our own inner beauty spring
from the same source
it sees rocks trees and reflecting
waters tonight we’re going to talk about
a place sort of the different components
about this place the first is the actual
physical geography of it it was
designated one of the first wilderness
areas when the Wilderness Act was passed
most of this wilderness is in the higher
elevation what they call the High Sierra
the second part I wanted to talk about
was the early work of Ansel Adams that’s
associated with this particular area
this was where Ansel Adams developed his
love of nature was an employee with the
Sierra Club and kind of where he
mastered his craft of photography the
third part I wanted to try and show some
of my work how he influenced me this was
a picture that I took in 1977 I had read
a lot of the Ansel Adams basic manuals
and sort of learned a lot about
photography and the love of landscape
photography from reading those Ansel
Adams books and then the fourth part was
obvious the new work that I’ve done this
landscape series this picture I just
took but we’re sort of in a helicopter
hovering over Jun Lake and looking back
and up the snowy part in the back there
is the Ansel Adams wilderness so I just
had a few the color pictures this is the
most remote area in the North Fork of
the San Joaquin River the year that I
was there
almost 50 feet of snow in the mountain
in the foreground there is about Ansel
Adams there’s actually also a mountain
named after him but it’s unique about a
lot of the Ansel Adams wilderness it’s
metamorphic rock there’s this one little
area it’s not the typical granite that
you find a lot of the Sierras and it’s
amazing water the very clean crystal
clear blue water dana lake and the
storms that come from the pacific and
they hit the mountains and form these
afternoon thunderstorms and of course
the waters of the main theme Rainbow
Falls and the forests this is one area
there’s a Aspen’s also a lot of
evergreens so I wanted to give a little
bit of the history of how Ansel Adams
got involved with this area this is a
picture of his father on the left and
mother and Ansel when he was 14 years
old and his aunt this is his first trip
to Yosemite and in his autobiography
Ansel Adams said if he was a kid today
he would be described as a DD child
whatever it was he didn’t do well in
school and his father took him out of
school in the 8th grade and gave him
some private tutoring in bottom of piano
and he gave him some piano lessons and
he took sort of took to that but he also
gave him up a brownie camera and it went
to Yosemite and he kind of fell in love
with the place and by the time he was
about 20 years old he had gotten this
job as a caretaker of the LeConte
memorial which is sort of a stone house
that was sort of the clubhouse of the
Sierra Club in Yosemite Valley it’s
still there and he also started going on
trips he bought his own burro to carry
his camera equipment and that’s kind of
the way they did it back then and he was
one of the early rock climbers the man
on the left is David Brower who was
the longtime head of the Sierra Club and
back then they were kids tennis shoes
and just tied a rope together and they
said if if one a person fell all that
meant is that both of them would die but
say there was no security or AAA it was
pretty precarious ties but this is like
1930s but his job was to sort of be the
logistics person for the summer high
sierra trips they call them and it was
primarily well-to-do businessmen from
san francisco who really liked the
Sierras and they would take a whole
month off and they would come and
basically camp out and the High Sierras
and amazingly Adams would you know take
care of everybody but he would get up
early in the morning and take pictures
and so a lot of the pictures that I’ll
show you were taken actually during
these one-month trips so he came of age
in a era of pictorialism and this
picture was one of his very first it
looks kind of strangely modern now sort
of a selective focus pictorialism was
seen as sort of an imitation of painting
and that’s eventually what people like
Adams our rebelled against we actually
know now that even before that it was
the painters who sort of copied the
camera obscura which is a form of
photography so that’s sort of what
really happened but in this era they
used the lens that induced these
spherical aberrations and made sort of a
soft focus and was seen as sort of
imitation of painting but he soon
switched and this is one of his first
kind of straight pictures and during
this time they used glass plates and the
emulsions were only sensitive to blue
lights so all the skies would turn this
sort of white color and it kind of gave
atmospheric effect but in 1923 they
switched to the emulsions where you
could actually photograph by moonlight
longer exposures and then the big
advance was you could actually
photograph clouds which was
real important part of the Sierras is
afternoon clouds that build up in the
summertime so also it seemed to me in
reading about it there was this big
change sort of in his intellectual
thinking it he went from sort of being
the school brat and to writing things
like this this is when some of his words
from 1923 you said I was climbing the
Long Ridge west of Mount Clark I was
suddenly arrested in the long crunching
path by an exceedingly pointed awareness
of the light I saw more clearly than
I’ve ever seen before or since the minut
detail of the grasses the small float
some of the forests the motion of the
high clouds streaming above the peaks I
dreamed that for a moment time stood
quietly and the vision became but a
shadow of an infinitely greater world so
the other thing I thought was sort of
interesting was he had believed that
dead trees were more expressive than
live ones so it took quite a few
pictures of dead trees this is kind of a
hostile environment when you get into
high elevations so this is a Foxtel pine
may have been dead 400 years or so it
just stays there but he also embraced
not only a rejection of pictorialism but
this embrace of modernism Alfred
Stieglitz had a saying that said art
should be the affirmation of life and
that’s throughout his whole career he
always hung to that that it should be
affirming he also had a belief he called
it extracts he didn’t like with somebody
called this picture abstract he thought
that the role of the photographer was to
extract a part of nature he called it to
make form from shapes he thought all
nature was just shapes and it was up to
the artist to make form out of it and to
extract and so this was sort of a
radical view for the time if you think
of a picture like this compared to the
nineteen
century photographers who are survey
photographers would go out and their job
was mainly to go out west survey take
these pictures and go back east and show
people what was out there but Adams
really bought it you should sort of jekt
your emotional state feelings toward the
environment or toward the landscape
there’s a little bit of a story behind
this picture it’s called the Michael
minaret and one of those well-to-do
hurly Sierra Club members was named
Walter Starr and he had a son who is an
avid climber and he liked to climb so
low and unfortunately he fell to his
death on this Michael minaret and so he
asked Ansel Adams if he would put
together a book of his best pictures of
the John Muir Trail because his son his
dream was to write a guide book of the
John Muir Trail which still exists it’s
called the Stars guide to John Muir
Trail so that was what made this book
happen in 1938 and it’s really the only
book it’s totally written by Ansel Adams
and has 50 of his photographs the book
was sold for $15 at the time which is
quite a bit and there’s only 500 copies
so this whole early work was from the
period of around 1920 to 1938 and then
after that World War 2 came about and
Ansel Adams had this idea that he would
try and do pictures of all the beautiful
places in the America to make people
feel patriotic about their country so he
got a commission called the mural
project and he bought this car which he
called Helios and he instead of he
turned in the burro for the car and got
the large-format eight-by-ten camera and
did a lot of the pictures that he’s
really famous for in some ways they’re a
grander scope I think than the earlier
work he also got a Guggenheim Fellowship
to photograph the National Parks Mount
McKinley probably one of his more famous
clearing winter storm
Yosemite so I kind of moved to the third
part to show you some of my early work
this was a picture that I took in 1975 I
took a photo class when I was a senior
in high school and I had a really good
photography teacher and we actually went
on a field trip up to Yosemite and this
was really one of my first pictures I
was taken I had bought a 4×5 camera with
black and white and I went to Death
Valley because that was another one of
Ansel Adams favorite hangouts and this
was sort of a detail that I tried and I
look at these pictures they’re not
anything that I’ve you know sold or
think of my best work but it really
makes me feel that this was the type of
work that I was originally drawn to the
landscape of the western US so what I
did sort of naively I was just the first
year in college and I only been
photographing for a year or two I wrote
to Ansel Adams and asked if I could come
show him my portfolio up in Carmel and
to my surprise he wrote a letter back
which is I learned it he wrote over a
hundred thousand letters in his life and
he he had a philosophy he always
answered every letter and that anybody
that wanted to come see him could come
at five o’clock he had a cocktail hour
at that time and because as long as he
had his drink and he would talk to you
so I actually went there and he signs
sign my book this was in 1977 and one
thing that I remember from it succinctly
was when he looked at this picture he
said that he thought that I should crop
it differently and he said that it’s
real important along the edges to always
have the clean edges so he said to kind
of go like that it’s a very small
difference but if you look it sort of
makes a little cleaner along the edges
so I think that’s sort of the modernism
eye that he had through all his work and
if you in a young photographer you
really can’t go wrong learning that it’s
kind of like you know learning classical
music or something it’s timeless and his
work sort of stands because he the way
he did his compositions so what happened
after that was I ended up I went to
journalism school at University of
Missouri and was selected as a summer
intern and started doing some stories
for the Geographic and this was one of
the first ones was on the California
desert Protection Act so I felt like
this is back swervin old stomping
grounds a California desert I am trained
as a photojournalist but I’ve used
landscape photography a lot of stories
and this isn’t Grand Canyon there’s not
too many journalists who’s going to have
a background in landscape photographers
it’s a story about Wilderness Act the
wilderness system and this is up in
Alaska up in the Tracy Arm wilderness
and just way up in Devon Island some of
these people go out there to study about
going to Mars and a high elevation
impact crater one of my favorite places
down in Torres del Paine a national park
in Patagonia way down in Tierra del
Fuego this was a story about anniversary
Darwin’s expedition on the Beagle Darwin
went to this Pia Bay and we did a story
about the 40th anniversary of the
National trail system this was aa Sark
Island Trail Fraser Island Australia
Finland Lanka national park as a moon
light that they call the candlelight
spruce this was actually for a story on
the carbon cycle now the carbon in the
calcium carbonate in the shales
so these pictures sort of all had a
journalistic side to them this was a
story by the climate change is in
Switzerland sort of the melting glacier
the bathtub ring
the drying lakepowell can you see the
bathtub ring desert called this Viking
weather because this was Greenland was
getting warmer and it was why the the
Vikings had to leave and it got colder
and I’ve also used it on some
environmental stories story about
hardrock mining this was a Superfund
site water pollution in China even in a
Home Depot parking lot in Baltimore this
is that we’re talking about the non
point source water pollution that runs
off the parking lot into the Chesapeake
Bay and these are depleted uranium
canisters the nuclear waste from Paducah
the oil sands all the scraping of the
boreal forests for the oil and this is
for the drought sort of a landscape of a
marina where there’s no boats or no
water and the Yoho National Park just
the other side of the Rockies from Banff
and Lake Louise so really a great park
in the Canadian Rockies okay so now I
get sort of to the last part just try to
explain a little bit of some of the
creative process about this story that I
went through this was the lead picture
that was in the Geographic article and I
went through kind of a lot of thought
about how to do this how to sort of do a
tribute and sort of show that I had
really been inspired by Ansel Adams but
not sort of copy it or not do what
sometimes it’s called stand in the same
tripod holes as Ansel and stuff like
that so the first thing I had to decide
was where to do it in black-and-white or
color and he shooting digital you have a
raw file and you can make it color or
black and white I really liked the way
the black and white that granite just
seemed to really come out much more
forceful and the sculptural qualities to
me really was the right way to do it but
then I still had the
figure out I didn’t want to do it
exactly like Ansel Adams had shot you
know 75 years ago so I just kind of came
up with this idea of sort of referencing
some of his pictures for people who are
real fans of his work they could look at
it and sort of see that there was a
connection but also see that it was a
little bit more up to date version of it
the other thing I did was a lot of
nature books are divided by the seasons
and we decided to just do it by the type
of scenery that you would see if you
went there just so you’d sort of focus
on instead of just you know the
summertime or a vacation it would be
like you’re looking at certain peaks or
Lakes something these are kind of the
peaks baek’s this again that’s the black
and white Ansel Adams council Adams
what’s called Cabin Lake this was
another one of those that we looked at
in color it was actually taken before
sunrise it was actually sort of flat but
when they’re all the same tone in black
and white it brings out the granite
surprised instance to actually see
little white caps this is up about
10,000 feet maybe about a 30 mile an
hour wind there’s also what’s called the
Sierra high trail it sort of follows the
John Muir Trail which is this 211 mile
trail through the Sierras and someone
came up with an idea to sort of go that
same route but not have any trail and so
this is the part out it’s called Nancy
paths and you actually with your pack
and everything it’s sort of a scramble
to get up there but it had a nice nice
view of the minarets
another thing that Ansel Adams had this
philosophy that climbing to the top of
the mountain you don’t get the best view
and the very bottom of the mountain you
don’t get the best view but you sort of
get the best view part way up and so
that’s what this was sort of about a
third way is one of the meadows these
are trees that have been pushed over by
the heavy snow and a lot of avalanches
that could take place
this is sort of idea I had of
referencing back to some of Adams work
he took pictures of similar subject
matters this is in the water
wilderness area is very important for
the state of California because it the
watershed one side comes all the way
down and ends up being the drinking
water for Los Angeles and the other side
the SAP this is the San Joaquin River
this flows down into the Central Valley
and this is the wire that’s used for the
irrigation this water ends up the 60% of
it ends up watering lawns in Los Angeles
there’s one area on the east side and
actually starts snowing I went there for
the fall colors and the fall colors
weren’t even out yet so I ended up
coming back a little bit later this is
the Sierra juniper and the largest trees
in the wilderness this was shot by
moonlight it’s a kind of picture that
was really only possible with a digital
sensor that’s why I really thought that
digital was the best way to do a story
like this because I think if Ansel Adams
would alive now he would be using the
latest technology I actually always
thought of fall colors as color
photographs but I really more and more
like the way they photograph in black
and white on the right side is sort of
between the orange and the yellow you
get just a slight delineation and the
print since the creek that comes out of
Parker Lake and I did go there in the
winter this was actually when I went on
the fall trip started sledding on those
same aspen trees I think we were the
probably the only people in the
wilderness and this time in February and
we had to do what’s called this
all-terrain skiing which is sort of a
hybrid of cross-country and downhill
skiing and I timed it to go in during a
storm which turned out to be good for
photographs but sort of difficult to
move around
so we saw this this is what they call a
Sierra wave cloud and this kind of means
oh you know when you see it’s about a 50
mile an hour wind up on this mount Lyell
there and I could just barely stand up
taking this picture holding the tripod
down and then it got even worse and then
it got even worse that and this was
about 70 mile an hour winds and we ended
up having to dig a snow cave just
something I had never done and I was
glad I had the people with me too knew
how to do that so we stayed in there for
two nights and I actually just climbed
out long enough to take this pictures
about 50 feet away from the opening of
the snow cave that’s about all we could
go is really like a whiteout conditions
I wanted to see what it looked like
afterwards so when we got back out I
hired a plane and took some pictures
from the air so I wrote it afterward so
I just wanted to read a little bit about
that so the times we live in today are
radically different from those of the
young Ansel Adams who photographed the
Sierra wilderness times were hard in the
1920s and 1930s but Americans believed
that things would get better and
progress would come technology was seen
as a way to make life more comfortable
and exciting artists devoted to
modernism focused on form is the
ultimate expression Alfred Stieglitz
summed it up by saying that art should
be the affirmation of life Adams agreed
and he also believed that man could live
in harmony with nature so what are we to
make of Ansel Adams in our era of
cynicism does it still hold true that
art in nature can be inspirational I
believe there will always be the human
need for affirmation and inspiration of
the kind immortalized by Adams in his
Sierra photographs our spirits our own
inner beauty spring from the same source
as these rocks trees and reflecting
waters
it has not even been a century since
Ansel Adams carried his camera on a
burro along the trails of the Sierra
high country in the world of nature that
was only yesterday thang
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