One morning while driving along California's coastal Highway One, Ansel Adams was struck with the idea of making a sequence: "I noted that below me was a nice curve of rockfall fronting the beach. The surf was streaming over the beach, barely touching the rocks and creating one beautiful pattern after another. I realized that I could perhaps make a series of images that might become a sequence …" Surf Sequence is both cinematographic and musical in its rhythmic progression of images. Although each of the five images had different exposures, Adams ensured they were tonally harmonious in their printing and uniformly cropped, and that they could work graphically in any order.
