Day: February 24, 2024

Had a couple of comments and an enquiry about an off-handed remark I made on St Ansel and the “Zone System” last post.

So for the Non-tech heads—Click away now. Nothing to see here!

If you’re still reading, the majority of the blog is a tad (ok a great big bulge) Tongue in Cheek.

The Zone System, and pre-visualistation (What last weeks blog was about) were the brainchild(ren) of Ansel Adams and Fred Archer. Historical issue, they were photographing in the 1930s using mostly large format cameras, exposing one sheet of filum at a time. Due a range of limitations in technology at the time, the filums cannot be compared to today’s clever chemisty and technological advancements, nor can they begin to be compared to whatever clever senor you have in your sparkling new Mirrorless camera. (What. Don’t tell me you’re back in the days of wooden wagon wheels with one of them oldfashioned, outdated DSLRs (Taylor Swift wouldn’t been seen out with one of them))

Adams and Archer worked with scientists from Kodak who had explored the amount of light reflected from most average scenes. (You know it was what was printed on the box or leaflet with each roll of film) Kodak Scientists had figured out the average scene reflected around 12-13% brightness or more correctly incident illumination . And designed their exposure recommendations accordingly.
St Ansel (et al.) wanted the number to be closer to 18% and after some discussions Kodak introduced into their product line the truly amazing “Neutral Test Card” with its equally infamous Publication “R-27” leaflet. Which orginally—then didn’t—and then did again—included a paragrah that the reading from the exposure meter needed to be increased by 1/2stop from the meter reading. (Of course who reads instructions? and that maybe is why a certain copywriter took the paragraph out sometime in the late 1960-70s, and why it was reinserted after the ‘error’ was discovered.)

St Ansel (et al.) needed the extra one half stop or so exposure to comply with their:
Maxim of the Day
1. Always expose for the shadows and let the highlights be corrected in development.
(As an aside if you’ve ever seen an St. Ansel original negative its a very thin low contrast thing.)

2 Previsualise how the range of tones will print.
So they could work out what was going to be printable or not, they Pre-visualised those brightness values into 11 “Zones” Oh, welcome back skim reader.

Zone 0 would be as black as old boots and contain no detail, Zone X would be white as driven snow and contain no detail. In the middle Zone 5 would contain…….
Mid-tones.
And midtone err sorry, Zone 5 was 18% reflectance.
Insert Small ding ding bell to large clang of claxton.

What does all this have to do with Digital Photography.
Memo: Absolutely Nuthin!

Current Maxim from Michael Richman for Luminous Landscapes and Thomas Knoll—He, the author of the orginal Photoshop
1. Expose to the right. (ETTR) Or another way to say Expose for the Highlights and correct Shadows with the clever sliders which have replaced mixing up your own special developer brew. These days we call them “Presets” and who doesn’t have a harddrive full of them and never used?

2. Be careful what you point the “Spot” meter in camera at to be sure it’s going to be Zone 5. Or you could point it at say a Zone 3 value and adjust the exposure accordingly. But…really. Read the Memo.

If you point it at say the black feathers on a Black-shouleder Kite, and make no adjustments, the shot is going to be “Over Exposed” as the meter will try to expose to make the black—mid grey. if the Kite stays still long enough and you point it at the White chest feathers, and make no adjustments, the end result is gong to be…… wait for it…… Yes. Correct. Underexposed. Because the meter will try to expose to make the white—mid grey.

St. Ansel, exposed one sheet of film at a time and made notes on the development required.
We shoot a burst of 50 shots and hope we can find the right slider to correct it.

As an aside, my fav Black and White Monochrome software is Nik Software’s Nik Silver Efex
It has in its repertoire a little thumbnail and a tiny Zone system. Click on a ‘zone value’ and it gives Zebra stripes to those values in the photo. Yellow/Orange down the 1 and 2 end and a curious choice of Red to Black in the uppers. I’ve put some examples at the end of the blog.

So shoot often, shoot regularly, shoot with thought and don’t be bogged down with a system that for the vast majority of photographers (specialist landscapers, you won’t have read this far anyway).
We all get caught—some over or underexposed shots. But, we learn from that, and hopefully next time we are better prepared.

St. Ansel and Fred did the photography community a great service in helping to figure out the tonal values of a scene. Michael and Lord Thomas, gave us some freedom to experiement to get the best out of our digital chips, and no doubt have helped engineers train their product better.

So there you have it the 7 mega-zillionth explantation of St. Ansel’s system, Or you could just read his “The Negative ” book, and cut out the middle man.

Keep takin’ pictures. We do.

Here are three images from the SFx software.
Best to click on the images full size to see the colours. I made some corrections to the lower zones in the third one of them and you can see the change in the little tiny (next to useless) “Curves” view.