Yosemite National Park

[Kristi Marie]

Ansel Adams loved the area around Yosemite National Park so much that he called it “the great earth gesture,” as if Mother Nature had rewarded humanity with a prize. As history’s greatest landscape photographer, Adams knew a thing or two about stunning natural settings, but even his view was extremely limited. Had he been born a century later, chances are good that Adams would have photographed drop dead vistas from the Andes to the Australian Outback, but instead he confined his photography almost exclusively to the American West.

Gorgeous and diverse as the West is, Earth is a far, far larger place, full of landscapes that can be colorful, uniform and fitting to the eye, or just as easily, monotone, barren, misshapen and bizarre. Today, the kind of “great earth gestures,” Adams appreciated can be found on every continent.