Adams' five-book basic photo series (i.e. Zone System) books are the first photography books I purchased some 30 years ago. They are still on my book shelf and I re-read them every few years with new appreciation. I have applied the Zone System in the past to my B&W film work and also had the opportunity to make double-black duotones from about a dozen original Adams prints of his classic photos. Let me tell you having those photos on display in my office for a couple weeks and studying them in detail was wonderful. Thus, I'm familiar with his work from a "hands-on" perspective in the sense that I've both used his camera and darkroom methods, and done high quality reproduction from his orginal prints.

In my mind the hallmark of Adams work, especially in the period he established his style, was his ability to capture detail in his photos the human eye couldn't perceive in nature. Think about what you eye does when confronted with a bright, contrasty scene. Your iris stops down to correctly expose the highlights, and the shadow detail is lost. Adams, through his understanding of the reaction of film and paper to light and how to manipulate the tonal range of the negative to match the range of the single grade print papers available at the time, was able to capture more than the eye could see in all ranges of the tonal scale with exquisite separation between the tones. Thus people who walked by Half Dome every day in real life would look at his photos and see it literally in a "new" light. He didn't invent the Zone System. Credit for that goes to Edward Weston, but he did have the genius to both apply it and teach it in a way millions could understand -- if you take the time to read his books -- and emulate.

Adams also understood that the interplay of light and shadow is what gives life to a two-dimensonal representation of reality. His ability to manipulate the relative tonaility of his subject (i.e. how light or dark a specific object would reproduce relative to others objects in the photo) would made you swear some of his prints were back-lit when you look at the orginals.

I'm certainly no Ansel Adams, but I did try to emulate his style in this B&W conversion of a photo taken with my Kodak DC290. It wasn't a planned photo session, just a serendipitious location found in the middle of a Manila tourist trap during an afternoon outing:

http://super.nova.org/samples/BelenBW.jpg

Here's the original unedited file. You can see I did a lot of work in Photoshop.

http://super.nova.org/PhotoClass/Part1/P0000881c.jpg

Chuck Gardner