American landscape photographer, environmental activist and bearded sage, Ansel Adams was born in 1902 in San Francisco where he was lucky enough to grow up in a house blessed with magnificent views of cliffs, dunes and the Pacific Ocean (until his mum took the calendar down).
In 1916 he went on a family holiday to the Yosemite National Park and was completely blown away by all the rocks and trees and sky and stuff. Whipping out his Box Brownie (camera, not militaristically uniformed doll) he was soon snapping away like a Doberman in a bee swarm, instamatically realising he'd found his raison d'etre. He never looked back and spent the rest of his life returning to Yosemite, making some of the most stunning wilderness images in the history of American photography, some profound observations about the nature of mankind's relationship with nature and some extremely tasty camp fire suppers (but never did get to find that lost lens cap).
Recognising that his developing passion and passion for developing was unstoppable, he went to work in commercial photography whilst accelerating his rise to fame in fine art photography with a series of staggering images, all eloquently informed by his awareness of the infinite visual drama created by constantly changing natural light (and constantly changing film). Even in his eighties Ansel was passionate about the preservation of the environment but, being too old to chain himself to the topmost branches of Yosemite's sequoias, he went for the harder option and personally attempted to explain the finer points of conservation to the other sort of wooden top, later describing Ronald Reagan as 'opaque' (as in 'as opaque as two sequoia planks').
Nevertheless, some of what he said must have rubbed off because a few months after Ansel's death, Congress created a vast protected wilderness area, which they sensibly named Ansel Adam's Wilderness (having decided against the 'Ron's General Knowledge' option).
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