Photography Zone System
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Photography Zone System
what is the zone system of photography?
You have to understand the differences between the human eye and light sensitive silver compounds in film and paper to get the complete gist of it.
Your eyes can see several thousand distinct shades of gray, so if you drew 11 squares on a piece of paper, colored the far left one (#0) black, kept the far right one (#10) white and colored the 9 squares in between (#’s 1-9) different shades of gray in order from black to white, you would be able to see 11 distinct boxes.
The film in your camera can only see *five* of the boxes you just drew – black, dark gray, medium gray, light gray and white. What’s more, it can only see five *consecutive* shades, so it only sees five consecutive boxes.
That means if you tell your camera you want it’s film to see box 2 as black, then it will see box 3 as dark gray, box 4 as medium gray, box 5 as light gray and boxes 6 thru 11 as white. Even though you don’t see them that way.
So basically, the zone system measures how light and dark different areas in a scene, portrait or still life you want to shoot are. Photogs measure this in steps called f-stops. You never want the lightest and darkest areas of your subject to be more than 5 f-stops in difference because your film will not be able to see details in your shadows and highlights.
Photography Zone System
Photography question, 18% grey?
When using the zone system, why is middle grey [zone 5] also called 18% grey? Why not 50% grey?
Or to put it very simply, 50% grey looks very dark to us. It looks more like charcoal. 18% grey looks to the human eye as halfway between black and white.
section 1 ( Zone System)
zone system of photography?
why is the zone system so important and how would photography be today without it?
This sounds a lot like an essay question.
In todays digital world, it has no importance except as a vehicle to understand exposure and how processing adjustments made while developing black and white film can enhance and expand the expected tonal range of any black and white film. The zone system was used with reflective light meters and the “expansion and compression system” was used with incident light meters.
It seems that many do not need it, so with or without it matters not to them.
I for one believe it is essential to understand exposure and development in order to use any photographic medium with the least amount of post production “fixing”
Al Weber Discusses the Zone System
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New Photo Series 2: Negative:: The Ansel Adams Photography Series 2 £9.89 Excellent clean copy… |
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The Practical Zone System for Film and Digital Photography: Classic Tool, Universal Applications £17.49 … |
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The Digital Zone System Primer £16.46 … |