{"id":30680,"date":"2017-11-20T08:59:51","date_gmt":"2017-11-20T13:59:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.keh.com\/?p=30680"},"modified":"2017-11-20T09:23:55","modified_gmt":"2017-11-20T14:23:55","slug":"inside-making-a-photograph-by-ansel-adams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.keh.com\/expert-advice\/photography\/education\/inside-making-a-photograph-by-ansel-adams\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside \u201cMaking A Photograph\u201d by Ansel Adams"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the great opportunities I have while working at KEH Camera<\/a> is access to an amazing number of cameras and lenses that come into KEH, and also to all the photographic related accessories that sometimes accompany them.<\/span><\/p>\n

My personal photographic education began in 1973 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin when I enrolled in the Associate and Applied Science degree program at Milwaukee Area Technical College. Introductory classes consisted of basic photography using only<\/em> a 4X5 view camera and B&W film for our entire first year.<\/span><\/p>\n

Concurrently, Ansel Adams and his work were becoming popular with the general public. His series of three books on the technical aspects of photography, The Camera, The Negative and The Print, <\/em>became our \u201cbible\u201d while I was in school. I continued to refer to them for the next twenty-five years, and even now in our age of digital photography, I still recommend them. The basic photographic information they convey is applicable across both the film and digital worlds of photography.<\/span><\/p>\n

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One afternoon as I was walking past the KEH eBay area, I noticed a book by Ansel Adams that I didn\u2019t know existed. Entitled \u201cMaking A Photograph<\/em>\u201d, I immediately started paging through it. Not only was I taken with the fact that this book had to be the precursor to my \u201cbible\u201d but also by the quality of the printing used to make the photographic plates. The copy of the book I came across was the second edition printed in 1939.<\/span><\/p>\n

As I researched the book I discovered that by 1935 Adams had become famous in the photography world largely based on a series of articles he wrote for the popular photography press and most especially via the publication,\u00a0Camera Craft<\/em>. The articles were primarily technical in nature and brought a new clarity to the practical problems of photography.<\/span><\/p>\n

These articles probably encouraged Studio Publications (London) to commission Adams to write \u201cMaking A Photograph\u201d<\/em>\u00a0(1935), a guide to photographic technique and illustrated primarily with his own photographs. This book was a huge success, in part because of the quality of its letterpress photographic reproductions, all of which were printed separately from the text and then tipped onto the book page. The reproductions were so good that they were often mistaken for original photographic prints.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The \u201cMaking A Photograph<\/em>\u201d begins with a foreword by photographer Edward Weston and covers:<\/span><\/p>\n