Best spots to take a shot: Can you improve on the original?
If you’ve ever been to London, a trip to Abbey Road Studios is no doubt in the cards. You may stand at that famous street in front where the 4 Beatles walked across to create the cover of the Abbey Road album.
Of course you and your mates/family will recreate that shot hopefully standing in the same spot as the photographer did for that famous photo.
But it won’t be the same now, will it?
In a related story, the folks at National Geographic this month, sent out a photographer to do a similar thing, except this time using the work of Ansel Adams as a guide.
“On his first trip to the Sierra Nevada, in June of 1916, Ansel Adams went armed with a camera—a Kodak No. 1 Brownie—and started shooting. “I expect to be broke if I keep up the rate I am taking pictures,” the budding 14-year-old photographer wrote to his Aunt Mary in San Francisco that summer. “I have taken 30 already.”
He kept shooting for almost seven decades, until his death at age 82 in 1984, by which time he had become a world-famous photographer and a powerful voice for wilderness. Although he traveled far and wide, he returned again and again to the Sierra—”a noble gesture of the earth,” in his phrase—for the adventure, artistic inspiration, friendship, and solace he found among its jagged granite peaks, snow-swept passes, and brooding skies. His uncompromising portrayal of these subjects still draws pilgrims to the wilderness that bears his name, deep in the heart of the High Sierra, in hopes of seeing what Ansel Adams saw there.”
excerpt printed with permission from National Geographic Society. Full article here.
And the “pilgrims” it brought this time included nature photographer Peter Essick.
A setting moon makes a fitting backdrop for a lunarlike landscape near Donohue Pass.
Rocky spires known as the Minarets rise above 12,000 feet in the Ansel Adams Wilderness.
These images and the full story are in the current issue of National Geographic Magazine, Oct. 2011. Plus yu get some insight fro Ansel Adam son who joined in the search for the exact spots that his father may have placed is tripod, years ago.
Yes, everyone’s eye is different, and even though every major tourist location has a sign: “Best Place To Take Photo”, well it may not be.
The wilderness of the High Sierra proved that.
Mr. Essick’s photographs don’t look similar to Mr. Adams’s, now do they?
Check out the full story in the issue through this link.
Published on October 11th, 2011
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