There’s a moon on the cover of Ansel Adams’s Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs. I nearly missed it. I kept looking at the little white crosses below it. They looked as if somebody had switched them on.
That was the detail I wanted to take into Dive Deeper. I’d start with a picture of the jacket in What’s It Worth? and ask what photograph I was looking at. Then I’d ask how he got the crosses to glow. The book puts the answer on page 41, in Adams’s account of Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico. 1983 cover and page reference
Ansel Adams had one shot at Moonrise
Adams was driving back toward Santa Fe when he saw the moon rising over Hernandez and the last sunlight on the cemetery. He pulled over, set up an eight-by-ten camera, and couldn’t find his light meter. He knew the brightness of the moon from memory and used it to calculate the exposure. By the time he went to make a second exposure, the sunlight had left the crosses. The moon was still there. The picture he wanted was gone. Ansel Adams Gallery account
In the darkroom, he could stay with the picture as long as he wanted. The earlier prints have a softer sky. In later prints he made it much darker, and the crosses stand out so sharply you can see why I went back to the cover. He had seconds to take the photograph and years to decide how it should look. The gallery on Adams’s later prints
Does the book show you how to make 40 photographs?
It teaches by letting you look over Adams’s shoulder for forty finished pictures. He talks through what he saw, the light he had, and the choices he made with the camera and in the darkroom. The book came out in 1983. The photographs take you back through decades of his working life, including to a kitchen still life in San Francisco around 1932. He lit it with a skylight and a white card. He tried exposures of five, ten, and fifteen seconds, remembered that ten worked best, and admitted he’d forgotten the aperture. I found that reassuring from a man who could remember how bright the moon was. Publisher’s description · Ansel Adams, Examples, p. 113
How to recognize the 1983 first edition
The copyright page in this copy says First Edition, 1983 and gives the ISBN as 0-8212-1551-5. The publisher is Little, Brown and Company under its New York Graphic Society imprint. If you’re trying to match a copy in WIW, put the jacket and copyright page in the same scan. That gives you the image you came for and the small line that identifies the book you’re holding. 1983 edition record
The next time I point a camera at something familiar, I’d like to remember the egg. Adams could get a whole picture out of a thing I see every morning, if he gave himself a little time to look at it.