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The Camera

Contributors

By Ansel Adams

With Robert Baker

Formats and Prices

Price

$30.00

Price

$38.00 CAD

Format

Format:

  1. Trade Paperback $30.00 $38.00 CAD
  2. ebook (Digital original) $13.99 $17.99 CAD

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around June 1, 1995. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

Ansel Adams (1902-1984) produced some of the 20th century’s most iconic photographic images and helped nurture the art of photography through his creative innovations and peerless technical mastery.

The Camera–the first volume in Adams’ celebrated series of books on photographic techniques–has taught generations of photographers how to harness the camera’s artistic potential. This time-honored handbook distills the knowledge gained through a lifetime in photography and remains as vital today as when it was first published.

Along with visualization, image management, Adams’ famous Zone System, and other keys to photographic artistry, The Camera covers 35mm, medium-format, and large-format view cameras, while offering detailed advice on camera components such as lenses, shutters, and light meters. Beautifully illustrated with photographs as well as instructive line drawings, this classic manual belongs on every serious photographer’s bookshelf.

“Adams is a clear-thinking writer whose concepts cannot but help the serious photographer.” – New York Times

“A master-class kind of guide from an undisputed master.” – Publishers Weekly

Over 1 million copies sold.

On Sale
Jun 1, 1995
Page Count
224 pages
Publisher
Ansel Adams
ISBN-13
9780821221846

Ansel Adams

About the Author

In a career that spanned six decades, Ansel Adams was at once America’s foremost landscape photographer and one of its most respected environmentalists.

In Ansel Adams at 100, John Szarkowski notes that Adams’s role in the history of photography goes beyond his achievements as one of the great photographers of the twentieth century. As a leader in the study and appreciation of photography as an art, he played a major role in establishing the first department of photography in an art museum, at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (the same department that Szarkowski led from 1962 to 1991). Moreover, as a tireless advocate for improving the reproduction of photographs in books, Adams “badgered and cajoled his printers and platemakers” till they had “achieved in ink an unprecedented degree of fidelity to the chemical print.”

Although he devoted a lifetime to the cause of wilderness preservation, “Adams did not photograph the landscape as a matter of social service, but as a form of private worship. It was his own soul that he was trying to save,” Szarkowski writes, adding that “Ansel Adams’s great work was done under the stimulus of a profound and mystical experience of the natural world.” Szarkowski dates that experience to the early 1920s and a camping trip in the High Sierra. As Adams later recalled, “I was suddenly arrested in the long crunching path up the ridge by an exceedingly pointed awareness of the light…. I saw more clearly than I have ever seen before or since the minute detail of the grasses, the clusters of sand shifting in the wind, the small flotsam of the forest, the motion of the high clouds streaming above the peaks.”

Commenting on this moment of vision, Szarkowski writes, “One might guess that Adams spent the next quarter century trying to make a photograph that would give objective form to the sense of ineffable knowledge that on occasion, in his youth, inhabited him in the high mountains. Yosemite and the Sierra gave him not only his principal subject, but also the experience that provided the basis for a useful artistic idea: ‘The silver light turned every blade of grass and every particle of sand into a luminous metallic splendor.’”

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