Benjamin Franklin Institute to move out of the South End

Check out the Ansel Adams exhibit at the MFA, or read one of AA's books.

Or read Brad Washburn's accounts of the sometimes months of planning that went into some of his more famous shots.

You might find something of interest there.

As someone who has many friends who are photographers I think you are way under selling the art of Photography. Anyone can get a halfway decent shot , you are right, but to do it consistently is difficult. To get that shot that is needed, or the shot others do not have... way more goes into it then just pointing and shooting.

I took the photo that Adam uses on Twitter for the banner portion of the page. It took me an hour to get make sure the sky was just right. I knew where to take it, I knew the right settings. Yet there is plenty I still could have done to make it better.

Just even the logitistics of knowing where and when to be somewhere can get complicated. Do you think all those moon shots are just accidents?

I get complimented for my shots all the time but I am very cautious about taking credit beyond that as an "artist" because I have not reached that level yet. Although if you compare even my stuff to the average person off the street my stuff stands out heads and shoulders. Then place me next to someone with education in the field and they blow me away.

Also, Kapil doesn't know what he is talking about.

Ansel Adams was family friend.

My father received his photography training at the Franklin Institute and was hired as a staff photographer and reported directly to Dr. Land at Polaroid Corporation in the late 1960s, and specialized in large format photography (He then moved into a product line management position and managed products related to some of its large format and other professional grade products and was with Polaroid until its demise in the late 90s/early 2000s). As part of his employment training, he took several of Ansel Adams's workshops and ended up becoming quite friendly with him and his wife Virginia. He and Adams took several photo treks into Owens Valley, Death Valley, and Yosemite in the 70s and 80s, and he worked with Adams on a project to photograph the MFA's collection for the 100th anniversary of its opening. Adams came to our house for dinner at least once when he was visiting Boston (I have no memory of it, I was too young). In the summer when I was around 13 or 14, I went along with my father on some of his freelance jobs (usually real estate photography -and not for MLS listings- more for commercial brochures, etc), which involved doing things like standing in a sumac grove on the banks of the Mystic River in Medford, going to an upper floor of the Dock Square garage, or him talking our way into an under-construction penthouse atop Brook House in Brookline, all to get the right position and framing of the buildings he was photographing, and that was before hitting the darkroom. It was long and sometimes boring work (at least for me), but it was hard work, and what I saw was only the tip of the iceberg, because after the film was in the can, there was the whole matter of developing, editing, curating and printing (I won't even go into editing photos using an enlarger -it makes editing via photoshop look like fingerpainting). So Ron, I agree, Kapil knows nothing. Absolutely nothing.