Chasing Ansel Adams

Many of us enjoy standing where famous photographers stood in the past, seeing what they saw, and sometimes we even aspire to capture something evocative of their work, an artistic echo in time.

Fortunately with enough information we can determine the shooting position and even duplicate celestial events such as sun and moon position to recreate the lighting of the shot, so if we want to witness for example Ansel Adams' "Moon and Half Dome" image live, we can arrive for the same lunar and sun shadow alignment that Ansel saw in 1960. That won't happen again for almost a decade from now, but there will be a time later this year when the sun and moon position will be awfully close.

More on this later...