pursuing my muse.
muse /myo͞oz/ - noun 1. a person or personified force who is the source of inspiration for a creative artist.
Ansel Adams in 1957
This site is my attempt to hold myself accountable and walk in the footprints of an inspirational artist to take my photography to a new level. I will try to trail the famous landscape photographer Ansel Adams (1902-1984).
I don’t begin to think I will ever be on par with Ansel, but I will use his locations, framing, and photographs to help me dive more deeply and deliberately into capturing what Nature has to offer through art. I hope to start this project by holding a high bar and capture what he saw, and finish with my own take on these sites and experiences. I will grade myself against accuracy of location, accuracy of the framing, capturing of light and exposure with a transparent take on my own editing and skill as a photographer.
I hope to offer this to you as inspiration of your own, and would like to share my journey along the way.
Scorecard criteria
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Did I get to the right scene in the first place? I will grade this as a yes or no. There are cases where I am prevented from the site for safety or legal reasons. If so it will fall into the external category.
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So I’m at the right place, but did I put myself where I was supposed to go? This is harder than it sounds. Some times you can be just a few feet from the right perspective and get a completely different photo.
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Did I capture the right framing of the shot or did I miss the essence of what Ansel captured in the first place?
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This is a tricky one, and the last change you can make on site to emulate what Ansel saw. It is about more than just throwing on a wide-angle lens and trying to take the shot. Often times it requires a tele-photo >100-200mm to capture this essence with the right depth of field and the accurate exposure settings.
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This one is likely the trickiest for me, as it is the newest. Until very recently the terms dodge and burn were foreign to me, and to be honest I think intimidated me. I’ve never done much to a photo beyond a bit of cropping and exposure manipulation. I will not add anything to a photo that wasn’t there when I saw it in person, and will do my best to recreate what my eyes saw and the feeling taken from this location.
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This is the final item on my score card that gives me a final and purely subjective rating as to how I did overall at capturing the photo in the first place. It might as well be called the Andy score as it will be based on nothing but my own impression and from this I hope to continually raise the bar for myself.
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This is a list of things that will certainly impact the overall end product, but I won’t deduct points given their external nature. It doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t go back to a particular site, because it was the wrong time of year (in fact I plan to do just that). However, I think it’s fair to not lose points just because a particular type of storm wasn’t present. These conditions include weather conditions, time of year, site quality changes (tree growth, industrial or business presence)
