Ansel Adams cap­tured many an Amer­i­can land­scape as no pho­tog­ra­ph­er had before or has since, but in his large cat­a­log you’ll find few pic­tures as imme­di­ate­ly strik­ing as — and none more famous than — Moon­rise, Her­nan­dez, New Mex­i­co. Orig­i­nal­ly tak­en from the shoul­der of a high­way pass­ing through the com­mu­ni­ty of Her­nan­dez in 1941, the shot cap­tures the moon ris­ing above a clus­ter of hous­es, a church with a grave­yard, and a moun­tain range in the back­ground. All of those might seem like pret­ty stan­dard ele­ments of a remote part of Amer­i­ca in that era, but the sheer visu­al impact Adams draws from them shows what sep­a­rates a road-trip snap­shot from the work of a ded­i­cat­ed pho­tog­ra­ph­er.

Few pho­tog­ra­phers in the his­to­ry of the medi­um have been quite as ded­i­cat­ed as Adams, whose tech­niques we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. But as much as his delib­er­ate­ness and patience have become the stuff of pho­to­graph­ic leg­end, Moon­rise was very much a seat-of-the-pants achieve­ment.

Adams was dri­ving around the west with his son Michael and friend Cedric Wright at the behest of Sec­re­tary of the Inte­ri­or Harold Ick­es, who had com­mis­sioned Adams to pro­duce large-for­mat pho­tographs for the Depart­ment of the Inte­ri­or’s new muse­um. Toward the end of one not par­tic­u­lar­ly pro­duc­tive day on the job came the big moment. As Adams him­self tells it in Exam­ples: The Mak­ing of Forty Pho­tographs:

We were sail­ing south­ward along the high­way not far from Espanola when I glanced to the left and saw an extra­or­di­nary sit­u­a­tion — an inevitable pho­to­graph! I almost ditched the car and rushed to set up my 8×10 cam­era. I was yelling to my com­pan­ions to bring me things from the car as I strug­gled to change com­po­nents on my Cooke Triple-Con­vert­ible lens. I had a clear visu­al­iza­tion of the image I want­ed, but when the Wrat­ten No. 15 (G) fil­ter and the film hold­er were in place, I could not find my West­on expo­sure meter! The sit­u­a­tion was des­per­ate: the low sun was trail­ing the edge of the clouds in the west, and shad­ow would soon dim the white cross­es.

While an expe­ri­enced pho­tog­ra­ph­er today prob­a­bly won’t have used the same gear as Adams, they’ll cer­tain­ly rec­og­nize the dread­ful feel­ing of being about to lose a pre­cious image. What came to the res­cue of Moon­rise was­n’t any piece of Adams’ equip­ment — he nev­er did find that light meter — but the fact that he’d already spent so much time immersed so deeply in the prac­tice of pho­tog­ra­phy that he could set up and load his cam­era as if by pure instinct. Then, when he remem­bered that he knew the lumi­nos­i­ty of the moon (250 foot can­dles, for the record), he could cal­cu­late the prop­er expo­sure for the image he’d already visu­al­ized in his head: one with a bright moon and just enough light on the ground to make the cross­es in the church­yard glow.

You can learn more about the mak­ing and nature of Adams’ best-known pho­to­graph, prints of which com­mand high prices at auc­tion to this day, in the three videos here: first Adams’ own descrip­tion of his process mak­ing it, then a short by the Ansel Adams Gallery exam­in­ing a rare “mur­al-sized” print from the ear­ly 1970s, then a look into the pic­ture’s back­sto­ry by Swann Auc­tion Gal­leries. The tale of the pic­ture’s tak­ing, dra­mat­ic though it is, does­n’t quite con­vey the full extent of the pho­to­graph­ic work it took to cre­ate the image known to every­one famil­iar with Adams’ work (and many who aren’t famil­iar with it): he also had to go through quite a bit of tri­al and error in the devel­op­ment process to imbue the sky with just the right dark­ness. If any pho­tog­ra­ph­er could pro­duce Moon­rise, Her­nan­dez, New Mex­i­co, Ansel Adams could. But we might reflect on the fact that even a mas­ter like Ansel Adams only had one Moon­rise, Her­nan­dez, New Mex­i­co in his career — and even he almost missed it.

via Petapix­el

Relat­ed Con­tent:

226 Ansel Adams Pho­tographs of Great Amer­i­can Nation­al Parks Are Now Online

How to Take Pho­tographs Like Ansel Adams: The Mas­ter Explains The Art of “Visu­al­iza­tion”

200 Ansel Adams Pho­tographs Expose the Rig­ors of Life in Japan­ese Intern­ment Camps Dur­ing WW II

Ansel Adams, Pho­tog­ra­ph­er: 1958 Doc­u­men­tary Cap­tures the Cre­ative Process of the Icon­ic Amer­i­can Pho­tog­ra­ph­er

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Cam­eras are small, and get­ting small­er all the time. This devel­op­ment has helped us all doc­u­ment our lives, shar­ing the sights we see with an ease dif­fi­cult to imag­ine even twen­ty years ago. 120 years ago, pho­tog­ra­phy faced an entire­ly dif­fer­ent set of chal­lenges, but then as now, much of the moti­va­tion to meet them came from com­mer­cial inter­ests. Take the case of Chica­go pho­tog­ra­ph­er George R. Lawrence and his client the Chica­go & Alton Rail­way, who want­ed to pro­mote their brand-new Chica­go-to-St. Louis express ser­vice, the Alton Lim­it­ed. This prod­uct of the gold­en age of Amer­i­can train trav­el demand­ed some respectable pho­tog­ra­phy, a tech­nol­o­gy then still in its thrilling, pos­si­bil­i­ty-filled emer­gence.

A tru­ly ele­gant piece of work, the Alton Lim­it­ed would, dur­ing its 72-year lifes­pan, boast such fea­tures as a post office, a library, a Japan­ese tea-room, and a strik­ing maroon-and-gold col­or scheme that earned it the nick­name “the Red Train.”

Even from a dis­tance, the Alton Lim­it­ed looked upon its intro­duc­tion in 1899 like noth­ing else on the rail­roads, with its six iden­ti­cal Pull­man cars all designed in per­fect sym­me­try — the very aspect that so chal­lenged Lawrence to cap­ture it in a pho­to­graph. Sim­ply put, the whole train would­n’t fit in one pic­ture. While he could have shot each car sep­a­rate­ly and then stitched them togeth­er into one big print, he reject­ed that tech­nique for its inabil­i­ty to “pre­serve the absolute truth­ful­ness of per­spec­tive.”

Only a much big­ger cam­era, Lawrence knew, could cap­ture the whole train. And so, in the words of Atlas Obscu­ra’s Ani­ka Burgess, he “quick­ly went to work design­ing a cam­era that could hold a glass plate mea­sur­ing 8 feet by 4 1/2 feet. It was con­struct­ed by the cam­era man­u­fac­tur­er J.A. Ander­son from nat­ur­al cher­ry wood, with bespoke Carl Zeiss lens­es (also the largest ever made). The cam­era alone weighed 900 pounds. With the plate hold­er, it reached 1,400 pounds. Accord­ing to an August 1901 arti­cle in the Brook­lyn Dai­ly Eagle, the bel­lows was big enough to hold six men, and the whole cam­era took a total of 15 work­ers to oper­ate.” Trans­port­ing the cam­era to Brighton Park, “an ide­al van­tage point from which to shoot the wait­ing train,” required anoth­er team of men, and devel­op­ing the eight-foot long pho­to took ten gal­lons of chem­i­cals.

The adver­tise­ments in which Lawrence’s pho­to­graph appeared prac­ti­cal­ly glowed with pride in the Alton Lim­it­ed, billing it as “a train for two cities,” as “the only way between Chica­go and St. Louis,” as “the hand­somest train in the world.” The whole-train pic­ture beg­gared belief: though it went on to win Lawrence the Grand Prize for World Pho­to­graph­ic Excel­lence at the 1900 Paris Expo­si­tion, Burgess notes, it looked so impos­si­ble that both the pho­tog­ra­ph­er and Chica­go & Alton “had to sub­mit affi­davits to ver­i­fy that the pho­to­graph had been made on one plate.” We in the 21st cen­tu­ry, of course, have no rea­son to doubt its authen­tic­i­ty, or even to mar­vel at its inge­nu­ity until we know the sto­ry of the immense cus­tom cam­era with which Lawrence shot it. Today, what awes us are all those small­er shots of the Alton Lim­it­ed’s inte­ri­or, exud­ing a lux­u­ri­ous­ness that has long van­ished from Amer­i­ca’s rail­roads. If we were to find our­selves on such a train today, we’d sure­ly start Insta­gram­ming it right away.

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold a Beau­ti­ful Archive of 10,000 Vin­tage Cam­eras at Col­lec­tion Appareils

19-Year-Old Stu­dent Uses Ear­ly Spy Cam­era to Take Can­did Street Pho­tos (Cir­ca 1895)

See the First Pho­to­graph of a Human Being: A Pho­to Tak­en by Louis Daguerre (1838)

The His­to­ry of Pho­tog­ra­phy in Five Ani­mat­ed Min­utes: From Cam­era Obscu­ra to Cam­era Phone

Darren’s Big DIY Cam­era

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.