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Though intrigued with photography, in 1925, he decides that he wants to become a concert pianist and purchases the finest piano available. Ansel continues to take photographs and in 1927 he makes the photograph, Moonlith, the Face of Half Dome. Within a month of making this image, his musical endeavors ceased, however, it would be years before he would permanently turn away from his early dreams of music.
Ansel continues pursuing his career in photography. In 1928, he marries Virginia Best in Yosemite. After working with American photographer Paul Stand and others in 1930, Ansel's work began to develop the sharp focus characteristic that would later become his trademark. It was at this time that he publicly and whole-heartedly abandoned his musical career in favor of a career in photography. He moved to Yosemite in 1937 and later to Carmel, California.
Ansel Adams spent much of his life taking photographs in the national parks, and served as an official photographer for the Sierra Club, a conservation organization that he became involved with starting in his early teenage years. .
In 1932 Adams and other California photographers, including Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham, founded an influential group called Group f/64, which was devoted to taking straightforward photographs in sharp focus. The following year his son Michael was born and he opened the Ansel Adams Gallery at 166 Geary Street in San Francisco. Two years later, his daughter Anne was born and Adams published his first technical book Making a Photograph: An Introduction to Photography. This would be the first of a series of technical manuals by him.
He helped found the photography department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1940. This was the first department like this in any museum. In 1946 he helped establish the first academic department to teach photography, at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco (now the San Francisco Art Institute), and also taught at the Art Center School in Los Angeles.