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Digitization of Rare Sierra Club Album Printed by Ansel Adams in 1928

Two Cat Digital has completed digitization of an album of photographs, entitled In the Canadian Rockies, hand printed by Ansel Adams in 1928. This priceless album includes 50 photographs taken during Adams’ first Sierra Club “high country” trip. Adams made the prints, had it all custom bound in leather, and presented it as a gift to the trip leader, William Colby.

Ansel Adams would eventually become the official photographer for these backpacking trips held by the Sierra Club. Although most of the trips were in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California, this one was in the Canadian Rockies. Of the 50 photographs in the book, 34 are by Adams, while 16 are by other photographers on the trip. All were printed by Adams and then professionally bound in a custom leather binding. 

The scanning of this book was difficult because many of the pages would not lay flat, and most of the photographs had faded to some extent over the years. There was also noticeable “silvering” of the photographs, which caused unwanted reflections in the scans. 

We used our Betterlight scanback system for the highest possible quality. The Betterlight is mounted on a TTI Repro Camera and motorized column. We built a custom jig to hold each page flat without the use of glass, and without any damage to the fragile binding; and a laser system to ensure absolute alignment of the system. Perfect alignment is critical when scanning at extremely high resolutions. 

View a single page from this book in our Porfolio.

You can also see a slideshow of the scans on the Sierra Club's website.