The Tetons and Snake River

The next picture I wanted to look at was taken over 70 years ago. Like the picture of Mt. McKinley that I did last week, this picture has a distant, sharp mountain and a dynamic sky.

In this photograph, the artist plays with the light of the sky on the right side and the dark of the left. The tops of the mountains are also lighter with snow, whereas the lower sections are black with rock. In the foreground is a river that snakes through what looks like a swamp.

More than anything, this picture makes me want to go there and see this landscape. I think the photographer is trying to show the beauty of such a remote location. This picture uses a number of techniques. First and foremost, the picture is of the thing itself. It is a mountain and a river. But it also shows quite a fair amount of detail. Time is also played with. If I had to guess, the richness of this photograph is made possible through a long exposure. Also, the photographer plays with the light and darkness in the clouds to show the progression of time.

"The Tetons and Snake River." Ansel Adams. 1942. From Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Adams_The_Tetons_and_the_Snake_River.jpg

McKinley-Denali

        This photograph was taken atop the tallest mountain in North America, Mount McKinley, which has been re-named to Denali. This is a very dramatic picture, showing a number of different layers. At the bottom of the picture is a deep valley surrounded by jagged rocks and snow. Towards the middle of the picture is a layer of cloud cover that casts some of the lower segment in shadow. Above that are more dark mountains, and above that, the mountains are covered in snow. Combined with the top quarter of the image, the cloud cover over the mountain range, this gives a sense of one-point perspective to the peak in the middle of the picture. This is a successful picture because it shows how vast the mountain range is, and even from just the picture, one can get a sense of how cold it is. The artist is trying to portray the  vastness of the range of mountains, and how Denali stands tall in the distance. The photograph also plays with shadow in a very interesting manner. At certain points, the clouds above are thicker and darker, and the rocks below are in layers of shadow. 

From a photo essay on Mt. McKinley, Alaska, 1956. LIFE Magazine. http://time.com/4017660/mount-mckinley-denali-ascent-hoax. Web. 

George Tice Show, Berman Art Museum

September 1^st, 2015

George Tice show, Berman Art Museum

This evening, a professional photographer named George Tice came to the Berman Art Museum to discuss the ongoing show of his work. All of his black and white photos were really impressive. One of the benefits to black and white photographs is that rather than having the quality of pixelation that a picture would have in a digital medium, the resolution of the picture is much stronger. This makes it so that the film photographs can capture much more detail than what could be captured with a digital picture.

One of the things that I thought was interesting that George Tice spoke at length about was that the film he used was a lot bigger than the 30 mm film that we will be using in this class. This made it so that he was able to make his pictures a lot larger than we would be able to do.

Another thing that he talked about was the amount of time that he left his photographs exposed to light. As we talked in class on Monday, exposure times vary for different mediums and different amounts of light. Some of his photographs were taken at sunset, sunrise, or even at night. Therefore, he needed to keep the camera shutter open for much longer than if he took photographs during the day.