I can remember clearly the moment when I became seriously interested in photography - it was a campfire talk at Yosemite's Camp Curry in 1999. During free weekends in my mid and late 20s I would head out to the Sierras for short backpacking trips and peak bagging. I had previously climbed Mt. Whitney, Mt. Shasta, and done several other "classic" backcountry trips. Yosemite's Half Dome was a classic that I had not yet done and I wanted to add it to my backcountry resume. The night before my climb I camped in Lower Pines, after I ate dinner it was still too early to go to sleep and I decided to pass some time by going to the campfire talk at Camp Curry. After I arrived I found the topic of the talk that night was Ansel Adams. It was given by Jeff Nixon a photographer who had worked for Ansel's estate and had several slides to make his talk come alive. Of course I had heard of Ansel before but I didn't know much about him and had never taken more that a brief look at his photographs. But seeing his images, even these reproductions in slide form were enough to get me interested. Ansel's 'Monolith' was Half Dome, not so much as it was, but as I wanted it to be. This was the way I wanted to experience and remember the SierrasIf there was a single photograph that got me seriously interested in photography, this was it. The interest was first manifest by buying a serious 35 mm camera to take with my on my trips, turning the kitchen of my studio apartment into a darkroom, upgrading to a 4x5 camera, and taking a workshop from Ansel's former assistant John Sexton.
This photograph was very innovative for its time. It is in a location which was very difficult to access then, and remains very difficult to get to this day. Using a red filter to make the sky black is now a technique commonly used (and over used) by black and white photographers to manipulate the tonality of the sky giving it a dramatic dark appearance. In 1927, this technique was not commonly employed as most film was only sensitive to blue light. The panchromatic film used for this photograph was only recently made available and only available on glass plates. Ansel says that this image represented his first conscious visualization - the first time he 'saw' the finished image when he made the exposure. In his 'Examples' book, he says making this image 'was one of the most exciting moments of my photographic career.'
If I could choose one Ansel Adams photograph to own it would be this one. Unfortunately it has now become unaffordable, at least to me. There is no modern 'Yosemite special edition' version of this print. Even if Ansel's estate wanted to have someone print this negative again it would be impossible as the original glass plate was shattered in an accident after Ansel's death. For me the best option was to visit this spot with a 4x5 camera and red filter and make my own image. I did this in the fall of 2003, 76 years after Ansel visited the spot known as the diving board. It was a moving experience for me. There is no established trail to this spot and after fighting through the underbrush it is possible to momentarily forget that others stood on this spot before. Ansel's photograph really does convey the feeling of standing in this spot, surprisingly little had changed. The trees looked only very subtly different. Climbers on the face were audible, but only a hint of their brightly colored clothes were visible. An occasional jet airplane was visible high in the sky.
