·        Make reflective bullet pointed summaries on your reading and the comparisons that are being drawn in this chapter - add these to your learning log.

·        Choose an image from Art History which you will visually respond to and reflect on your choice on your learning log (you might initially choose several before narrowing it down, and you can write about the choices and ideas you are considering).

·        Developing your work from Project 1, make your own photographic image, or set of images that explores, challenges, or pays homage to the conventions and visual codes of the original image.

·        “As the Athenaeum wrote in l856: ‘Machinery can copy science, – can catch shadows, and keep them when caught; – but it takes a human heart to conceive the transfiguration, and a human brain to plan the Last Judgement”.

·        Photographic reproductions become popular by the mid nineteenth century due to their ease of production compared to other techniques.  Also, this was a way for people to use to lean and this gave the idea that “then perhaps there was also a market for the photographs they inspired”. 

·        “We are accustomed to seeing artworks in the even brightness of digital imaging or well-lit galleries. But Puranen’s pictures show a reflective veil of light that slides across the photographic surface to reveal something but not everything”.

·        Delahaye maybe suggesting that people may be missing out because they are constantly trying to find a model to fit art in to. 

·        “Artistic models mayshort-circuit our ability to engage directly with a work; the sources are so familiar”.

He has met a variety of different photographers who have impacted on him with his career and these photographers are Paul Strand, Edward Weston and Alfred Stieglitz.  One of the photographers, Paul Strand helped him to move away from the “pictorial” style that he had favoured in the 1920s. He learnt to do “straight photography”, in which the clarity of the lens was emphasized. Alfred Stieglitz played a massive vital role in his artistic life.  His first series of technical articles was published in the Camera Craft in the 1934 and his first widely distributed book, making a Photograph and this was done in 1935.  Adam had spent some time as a commercial photographer and some of the clients were the National Park Service, Kodak, Yosemite concessionaire and much more.    

He was a creative photographer, and he was all about the theory and the medium of photography.  He would frequently consult on his technical advice by Weston and Strand.  He was a principal photographic consultant to Polaroid and Hasselblad. He had developed the famous and highly complex “zone system” of controlling and relating exposure and development and this enables photographers to create visualise images and produce photographs that matched and expressed that visualisation.   Adams’s energy and capacity for work was simply colossal and he would often labour for eighteen or more hours per day or days to get the photo. 

He would travel to get amazing photographs of the natural beauty he revered and photographed and the audiences he has required. Also, he felt an intense commitment to promote photography as a fine art.    Adams was an unremitting activist for the cause of wilderness and the environment, and he would attend innumerable meetings and would write letters in support of his conservation philosophy to newspapers. His influence came from his photography and his work became the symbols, the veritable icons, of wild America. People would think about the national parks of the Sierra Club or nature of the environment, they would envision them in terms of Ansel Adams work. Adams’s black and white photographs weren’t “realistic” documents of nature, but they sought an intensification and purification of the psychological experience of natural beaty.  With his work, he creates a sense of the sublime magnificence of nature that infused the viewer with the emotional equivalent of wilderness, often more powerful than the actual thing. 

His work is a more traditional art history context, and he was the last and defining figure in the romantic tradition of nineteenth century American Landscape paintings and photography. 

Also, I liked the images in black and white and this is because you can see a variety of different details like shadows and highlights on the landscapes.  This helps to add depth to the photograph and it changes the mood and atmosphere of the photograph.  

Looking at the photographs that I have taken there is similarities to the work of Ansel Adams as I have managed to capture different atmospheres like he does. I have chosen four photographs that I have taken and from these four I will choose one image to be the final image. 

To me this image gives off a similar style to Ansel Adams as he has a lot of different details in his work from what is in the image to the shadows and highlights.    Also, I like the image as it is dramatic and has an atmosphere as the clouds helps to emphasise the mood of the image.