With this in mind, let us examine Weston and Adams:
As f/64 guys their styles overlap a lot, they differ almost entirely in the area of subject matter and composition.
Boy, that nails it! Weston was 14 years old when Adams was born in 1902, so their environment was essentially a similar time period, but Weston was 14 years more mature at any given point in their shared history. And until the very end of his career he was always better known than Adams. Specifically it is worth noting that both became at least somewhat accomlished in the style of Pictorialism that prevailed at the time they learned photography as teenagers. Weston in fact made a name for himself and achieved some level of recognition with that style.
Both absolutely abandoned Pictorialism at some point after they first met in 1927 and together were among the founders of Group F/64 which was directly opposed to Pictorialism in favor of extremely high detail images.
It's interesting to compare their path to that of Pablo Picasso! They wanted to distance themselves from painters. Picasso in early life worked very hard to use traditional styles of painting to produce as much detail as possible, but virtually abandoned that style in about 1910, roughly two decades before Weston and Adams stopped trying to copy the look of those paintings. Group F/64 proceeded to go where a painter never could with fine detail. Picasso changed from poorly copying the detail of nature with paint to very sharply capturing the signficance of nature with symbols. They exited the same house of traditon, but left though opposite doors!
Weston: modernist, semi-abstract, lots of , occasional human figures or parts of same.
Weston did a great deal of human figure work, and of course much of what he did that was not of a human was rather clearly intended to relate to human sentuality.
Adams: traditionalist, pictorial, easily identifiable natural subjects, almost never human figures, almost always objects of nature.
Adams was hardly a traditonalist. He didn't follow tradition, he invented it. He simply didn't do "pictorial" after the early 1930's. Adams didn't do "human figures" as such, and certainly not sensually... but he did much commercial photography that was "people picture" oriented. It's just hard to find because he was never famous for it. He did landscapes for fun, and people to put food on the table (at least until the early 1940's when his work began to sell for higher prices and in quantities).
Of course within each of their bodies of work there are individual periods and portfolios that refine the over-arching styles into a portfolio specific style. In Weston's case the styles sometimes included "sensual object with curves and arabesques placed centrally in the frame on a black background."
Weston's work was pretty much 100% about sex, and Adams died a pictorialist.
Actually not true in either instance. Weston's work was mostly sensual and only sometimes about sex. Adams simply didn't do "pictorialist" after about 1932 when Group F/64 was formed. Adams virtually never did anything sexual (as far as I know).
Ansel Adams was not signifiantly influenced to change by his relationship with his one and only wife. Weston was greatly influenced by each of several women. He wasn't quite as dramatic about it as Pablo Picasso, but it was very distinct.
A very simple exercise in the distnction between Weston and Adams is to look at the perspective a viewer has of the subject in their images. Weston has you looking down, Adams has you looking up. Otherwise, weston looked for abstractions in what was ordinary, and Adams was literal and sought out the already majestic to photograph it.
But... Ansel Adams' photography, like everyone elses, has interesting quirks. He donated more than 200 images to the Library of Congress from his 1943 work at the Manzanar Relocation Camp in California. A quick count shows that he took 4 times more pictures of one particular nurse than he did of the next most photographed person in the camp. He also made references to having kept track of her whereabouts after she left Manzanar.