(In fact, during two such trips, he missed the births of both his children.)Įn route to the Diving Board, Adams made several exposures, and by the time the group reached Half Dome, he had just two plates left. This single-minded dedication would become typical of the photographer’s later process, in which he would spend weeks at a time in the mountains, scouting out the perfect location for a single photograph.
It wasn’t an easy hike in the first place, and Adams was loaded down with a 40-pound pack containing his camera, a handful of filters and lenses, and 12 glass plate negatives. So Adams and his friends set out to reach the Diving Board, a rock slab hanging some 3,500 feet above the valley floor. He would need to get closer to Half Dome, he realized. But the resulting photo, with the rock face hooded in shadow, still lacks the drama of Adams’s later images. He’d also photographed the monolith more recently, hiking up to the park’s Glacier Point overlook for a panoramic view of its eastern portion. One of his favorite images from this time was an accidental upside-down shot, snapped as he tumbled off a tree stump. Several were the results of his very first experiments with a camera, after being gifted a Kodak Brownie at age 14 during a family vacation to Yosemite. He’d taken photographs of Half Dome before. But he still hadn’t captured the sheer cliff face of Half Dome to his satisfaction-and that was what he set out to do that April day.
As it turned out, Adams already had 11 of the 18 images he needed to complete the set. In 1926, his mentor Albert Bender, a patron of the arts in San Francisco, tasked him with producing a portfolio of large-format black-and-white photographs of mountains that he would finance and help the young artist sell. But it soon became clear to Adams that his level of talent would only garner him local fame, never national. He was an accomplished pianist, and had spent a winter in San Francisco teaching music lessons and performing as part of the Milanvi Trio. But this time, Adams was intent on capturing the perfect shot of Half Dome to add to his portfolio-a shot that would launch his career as one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century.įor most of his 25 years, Adams had considered himself a musician first and a photographer second. The aspiring photographer had made the trek before, once with an uncle and later with a painter acquaintance, who nearly broke his neck making the treacherous descent back down the narrow gully. Their destination on that chilly spring morning was Half Dome, the park’s iconic granite summit rising some 5,000 feet from the valley’s floor. On April 10, 1927, Ansel Adams clambered through Yosemite’s LeConte Gully trail with four of his friends in tow.
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