Visit the Vanished Wilderness with Ansel Adams

Good morning, Live Better than a Billionaire-a-Holics!

Are you feeling motivated this morning? I certainly hope so. I know that I am!

Have you ever wanted to stand on the edge of the endless frontier? Do you crave the wilderness as it was in the 19th century? Do you want to imagine yourself living as Native Americans did centuries ago?

If so, you're a great candidate to visit the marvelous Ansel Adams show at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts through December 31!

I have had the pleasure of visiting the show twice so far, and I will probably go again a few more times.

If you have marveled over books of Ansel Adams' photographs, I strongly urge you to see this show. The works are from the Lane Collection which is one of the most extensive resources for Adams' work. The Lanes chose well and these prints and screens are very fine. His own prints always look much better than the reproductions in books (even the authorized books).

If you are like one visitor I took with me, you may not know very much about Ansel Adams except that he was a photographer and environmentalist.

Let me give you a little more background. Adams grew up in sight of where the Golden Gate Bridge would later be built in an isolated spot on San Francisco Bay. He was strongly attracted to the wilderness and would trek anywhere or up any rocky cliff to get a better look. As a youngster, he was attracted to the piano and only slowly developed a taste for photography. An early visit to Yosemite with a Brownie camera began his interest. For many years, he was the official photographer for the concessions at Yosemite. An early member of the Sierra Club, Adams was often chosen to be the official photographer of various treks and exhibitions. Mr. Adams also received a Guggenheim grant later in life that allowed him to visit national parks all over the United States to photograph them. He also succeeded in helping create national parks by sharing his photographs with officials in Washington.

Adams' style began with the soft pictorialist focus that was popular at the time. Later he became fascinated with the potential to capture infinite detail with large format cameras. As his skill developed, he also began to adjust his images to reflect his emotions about the scene rather than just portray the scene as it appeared. His techniques involved choice of filter, selection of time of day and individualized printing where he selectively added or deleted light in different sections of the image.

Adams loved the outdoors and was willing to carry his cameras, glass plates and gear to inaccessible locations to get just the right composition. The exhibition has a fine video that shows some of his early climbing activities. Conditions were often pretty grim as a photograph of Charis Weston shows. Ms. Weston was so attacked by mosquitoes at Yosemite one summer that she even stuffed a shirt over her hair to help escape their bites.

The images in the show naturally reflect Yosemite, but also many high Sierra locales that you've never seen before.

I was also drawn to images from Canyon de Chelly and Mesa Verde where the Anasazi lived among the cliffs in pre-Columbian times.

I have visited almost every locale displayed in the show and that added greatly to my enjoyment. But for those who haven't, Adams also printed some large screens that make the outdoors seem to come indoors.

What's most important is that many of these scenes don't exist any more. You can only see them through Adams' work.

Adams had a wonderfully ironic sense of view. In many of the photographs, he shows the decay of natural items like rocks as being quite similar to the decay of rusting iron or fence posts that are weathering.

Here are the entry times for the exhibition:

Saturday through Tuesday: 10 a.m. through 3:30 p.m.
Wednesday through Friday: 10 a.m. through 8:30 p.m.

The exhibition is closed on Thanksgiving and Christmas but open all other days.

You can save money in three ways:

Become a member of the MFA. An individual membership is $70 and will provide you with two free tickets to all special exhibitions for a year . . . along with special member days early in the exhibition. See https://web7.nextticketing.com/mfa/.

Join the American Association of Museums. Depending on your income level and status, an individual membership is from $35 to $150. The membership will get you into many of the best museums for free along with a guest . . . or provide discounts. For this show, you will be able to purchase admission for $7 a person. See http://www.aam-us.org/aamlatest/aamnotes/memchanges.cfm/.

Bring lots of quarters and park on the street . . . or take the Huntington Avenue trolley. I was 3 minutes late to my meter and got a $25 ticket, so watch out for the aggressive policing of these meters. Most meters can be fed for 4 hours if you have enough quarters (which I didn't).

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N.B. As you can tell, I'm experimenting with color. Let me know what you like and what I should change about my use of color. Many thanks to Linda Grace for her suggestions which I am following!

Please let me know what else you would like to learn, and I'll do my best to help in future blog entries.

Here are some upcoming subjects:

Tomorrow, we will look at better ways to enjoy outdoor living before the weather turns cold.

Saturday, join me to look at how you can create a collection better than a billionaire.

On Sunday, we will examine how you can enjoy your Bible reading more.

Monday, let's take a look at inexpensive ways to enjoy great cruises.

For Tuesday, you'll engage the world's finest experts to answer any question you have . . . free of charge!

Wednesday, let's join a great party with leading celebrities for a star-studded blast.

On Thursday, we will look at the exciting possibilities of enjoying historic hotels in Europe.

If you are new to this blog, be sure to check out the updated table of contents entry that I posted on September 28. It will help you find earlier entries that may be of interest. I'll update this table of contents every week or so for your convenience.

August 31 was the most frequently read blog entry to date. Be sure to check it out!

Thanks so much for your support of this blog. I'm delighted that so many tens of thousands of people have made this blog part of their regular reading habit!

If you like this blog, please let others know who might also enjoy it. E-mailing your favorite post to them is a great idea.

Check out the index at http://livebetterthanabillionaireon5dollars.blogspot.com/2005/09/latest-table-of-contents-to-this-blogs_28.html to pick out your choice.

Thank you to my many friends, students, clients and blog readers who are spreading the good word about this blog.

If you are visiting today because someone invited you, I'm delighted to meet you! Let's stay in touch.

Remember to also check out

Live Spiritually Better than a Billionaire at http://livespirituallybetterthanabillionaire.blogspot.com/,

Be More Successful than a Billionaire at http://bemoresuccessfulthanabillionaire.blogspot.com/,

Enjoy Mansions Better than a Billionaire at http://enjoymansionsbetterthanabillionaire.blogspot.com/,

Enjoy Football Better than a Billionaire at http://enjoyfootballbetterthanabillionaire.blogspot.com/ and

Be a World Hero Better than a Billionaire at http://beaworldherobetterthanabillionaire.blogspot.com/.

I offer individual on-line tutorials and in-person seminars on living better than a billionaire on five dollars extra a day, creating 2,000 percent solutions (20 times the results with the same effort), developing more profitable business models and designing strategies that work regardless of the business environment. For information, contact me at ultimatecompetitiveadvantage@yahoo.com.

I am available to you as a speaker on these subjects. You can find my background at http://livebetterthanabillionaireon5dollars.blogspot.com/2005_08_30_livebetterthanabillionaireon5dollars_archive.html/.

May God bless you.

Donald W. Mitchell, Your Dream Concierge

Copyright 2005 Donald W. Mitchell