Yosemite and the Range of Light

Ansel Easton Adams (1902 - 1984) was an American photographer and environmentalist - one of the most famous in the world. His black and white landscape photographs of the American West, especially his iconic photos of Yosemite National Park, have been widely reproduced on calendars, posters, books, and the internet. This book, published in his lifetime with an extensive forward written by him are his favorite pictures of Yosemite and the "Range of Light" which is what John Muir called the Sierra Nevada Mountains which rise as a great wave of stone for four hundred miles between the arid wastes of the Great Basin and the verdant Central Valley of California. Adams states that "it is the detail of the Sierra that captures the eye and entices the camera". See for yourself what enticed Adams' eye and camera. Yosemite National Park reaches across the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountain range with an elevation that ranges from 2,127 to 13,114 and contains five major vegetation zones. Yosemite is internationally recognized for its granite cliffs, waterfalls, clear streams, giant sequoia groves, lakes, mountains, glaciers, and biological diversity. Because of his loving dedication, an area immediately adjacent to Yosemite to the southeast was named the Ansel Adams Wilderness.