Upper Yosemite Falls, 2003

About Artist Bob Kolbrener was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1942 and graduated from Washington University in 1963. His passion for fine art black and white photography began in 1968 when he innocently wandered into Best’s Studio (now The Ansel Adams Gallery) in Yosemite National Park. The magnificence of the Ansel Adams original prints were overwhelming, and he has been captivated by photography since. Bob and Sharon Kolbrener (it is not possible to know one and not the other) designed their lives around photography. They established a commercial photography business in St. Louis that provided work and an income for 10 months of the year, and made month long excursions from the Gateway to the West twice a year. In 1977 he was invited, along with Yousuf Karsh, to be an instructor at the Ansel Adams Workshop in Yosemite. The discipline of commercial photography, of trying to reproduce the desirable qualities of the three dimensional object on a sheet of paper, was very instructive to K