Luckily, as our instructor, Alan Ross, tells us repeatedly, "It's only film." So I reset my camera's shutter speed and shoot again. Scattered atop the sloping granite, a dozen amateur photographers point their cameras; judge the light falling on miles of peaks, forests, and lakes; and click. We're all taking a photography workshop offered by The Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite Valley. Folks have come from Colorado, California, Tennessee, Ontario, and New Zealand to learn the fine art of black-and-white photography in one of the settings where it was made famous. But the location is just one of the reasons people have enrolled. Our instructor is the other: Alan Ross assisted Ansel Adams for five years before going out on his own and becoming a lauded photographer and printer.

photography: Thayer Allyson Gowdy Adam Vail, a high school student who wants to be a professional photographer, sets up his large-format camera for a high-country lake shot.

Nothing fires me up more than traveling and seeing new places (good thing—it's my job). But I have a terrible memory. For me, photography has been a way to document experiences I might otherwise forget. Aside from one high school class, it's been mostly point, click, and deliver to the camera store.

Like most of the participants here, I enjoy using digital but prefer the hands-on, traditional approach of film. Digital is easier and can open the door to people intimidated by photography, but I'm not adept enough with computers to make it a real art form. Listening to the more experienced photographers in the class, I pick up on some terminology that explains this difference. My classmates keep saying "make a photograph," whereas I always thought in terms of "take a photograph." What a great distinction. Now I'm learning how to make a photograph; the camera is just the tool. This new way of thinking opens the door for creativity and control. One of Alan's favorite aspects of photography is the ability to step out of reality: "I can take a realistic shot, increase the contrast, and make it reflect more of what I thought I saw. What my heart saw."

In the darkroom sessions we learn how to control which areas of the print become darker or lighter, creating the contrast that makes black-and-white photographs so striking. Although roughly half of the workshop is spent indoors learning about Ansel Adams' methods and the printing process, we're now back outside in an aspen grove. The aspens' yellow, restless leaves represent fall in the western mountains. Eric, a participant from Colorado, points toward a nearby pine tree.

"That one next to the picnic table has picked up great light in the last five minutes," he says. "That's why I do photography; it stretches the way I see things. And I can do it anywhere."

Later, a half dozen of us have spread out among the skinny, ribbed aspens glowing ghostly white since the sun set over a steep ridge upcanyon. I am the last one to rejoin the group at the road where they stand, cameras put away, gawking at the ridgeline above.

"Did you see those gulls from Mono Lake?" they ask me, almost in unison. No, I hadn't.

"This flock of gulls just appeared out of nowhere and the slanting light made them look like silver discs dancing quickly against the pale blue sky. Then they'd disappear, then reappear again, like erratic meteors or fireworks moving in a choreographed flying dance."

"Well, did anyone get a photo?" I ask.

"No, we just watched. I'll never forget it."

See, it is all about the light . . . camera or not.