In April 1927, 25-year-old photographer Ansel Adams and a handful of friends climbed toward Half Dome at Yosemite National Park in California. The iconic granite peak, round except for one sheer vertical face, rises nearly 5,000 feet above the valley floor.<\/p>\n
They lugged Adams\u2019s bulky view camera, wooden tripod and 12 glass-plate negatives up a rocky cleft scoured by a chilly wind, while Virginia Best (who married Adams the following January) filmed their adventure. The group watched a waterfall roaring down into the canyon. They crossed patches of snow and ice and sheer rock until Adams reached the Diving Board, a granite shelf on the west shoulder of Half Dome, overhanging the valley below. By the time, Adams got there, he had used all but two of the negatives.<\/p>\n
Adams lined up his photograph in the ground glass on the back of the camera, where it appeared upside-down and backwards. \u201cI saw the photograph as a brooding form, with deep shadows and a distant sharp white peak against a dark sky,\u201d Adams wrote in his 1983 book \u201cExamples: The Making of 40 Photographs.\u201d<\/p>\n