Monolith: The Face of Half-Dome, Yosemite

Ansel Adams first visited Yosemite National Park with his family when he was 14 years old. During that trip his father gave him a Kodak Brownie camera and he shot his first photographs. The next year he returned to Yosemite and photographed the scenery with better camera equipment and a tripod. In his teens Adams developed his early photographic work as a member of the Sierra Club. He was later hired by the United States Department of the Interior to make photographs of national parks. Throughout his life Adams worked as a landscape photographer and advocated for environmental conservation. 

You don’t take a photograph, you make it. 

Ansel Adams

In 1927 Adams’s first photographic portfolio, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras, was published in book form. This publication launched his career as a professional photographer. Monolith: The Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, California is one of the most recognized images Adams included in the Parmelian Prints portfolio. To create this photograph, Adams used a Korona View camera fitted with a dark red filter. In black-and-white photography, a dark red filter dramatically increases contrast. It turns blue skies almost black and makes white clouds pop. It creates an infrared-like effect, transforming a landscape by emphasizing shapes, textures, and light.

According to Adams, this photograph captures the feeling he had while gazing at Half Dome rather than how the scenery actually looked.

I have photographed Half Dome innumerable times, but it is never the same Half Dome, never the same light or the same mood . . . The many images I have made reflect my varied creative responses to this remarkable granite monolith.

Ansel Adams

tags: environment, nature, ecology, place, mountains, black and white, landscape, light