Several years ago I had the pleasure and honor to film several interviews with Ansel Adams’ son Michael, this one at Ansel’s home. As you can see in the above image, Michael is telling me the story of how Ansel photographed his iconic image “Moonrise Hernandez, New Mexico.” What follows is a portion of that video, but  be sure to watch our full video and have a look at books by Ansel Adams

MARC: Now we’re at the centerpiece here.  Tell us this story.

MICHAEL: This is the centerpiece and probably Ansel’s most famous picture.  And I was very fortunate to be there when it was taken.  I was seven years old.  We were coming back to Santa Fe from north, and Ansel saw this image.  He pulled the car off the road very rapidly, got out — got us — there were two of us also with him, and we were trying to get the tripod, and he got the camera on it, and he had made the — looked at the picture and then he wanted his exposure meter, but he couldn’t find it.  So, he knew that the luminance of the moon was 250 foot-candles, and from that, he derived the exposure.  He took that picture, put the slide back in the film holder, turned the film holder around.  Before he could pull the slide to take a second one, all the light in the foreground was gone!

MARC:  Unbelievable!

MICHAEL:  So, it’s one of a kind.  The thing that’s interesting about this, and it’s something I can show you later.  If you look at the plain image, just the straight image of this, and then you look at this final print, there’s a huge difference, and this was part of Ansel’s magic is what he could do in the darkroom, and I can demonstrate that to you with the computer here in a few minutes, but — I can’t tell you the date this was done, but the later images had a darker sky than some of his earlier images.

MARC:  He changed didn’t he, as he reprinted?

MICHAEL: He changed.  He, I think in many ways, a lot of the contrasts became greater, darker skies, darker parts of the image in the later photographs as compared to some of his earlier ones.

MARC: So, the thing that he always talked about is the negative was the score, and the print was the performance.

MICHAEL:  He used that musician’s… sort of a feeling that…Yes, he could do the score on the negative, and then you interpreted it as the actual final performance for the print.

Now watch my visit to Ansel Adams’ home and darkroom for many more stories and to see the computer images Michael talked about.