A recent business portrait. Carefully lit and metered. It also happens to be my Dad.
Ansel Adams is dead. So is his spiritual successor, Galen Rowell. What they left behind in prints and negatives is not, in my mind, as significant as the technical endowment that they bestowed upon photography. Both men also left behind impressive legacies as outdoorsmen, authors and conservationists but for the scope of this article we will focus on the technical tool they gave us in the zone system and its relevancy to current digital technologies.
The history of the zone system is long, distinguished and much written about since its creation by Ansel Adams and Fred Archer in 1940. What we need to know is that it was developed as a method for precisely exposing, developing and printing black and white sheet film with the intention of producing a scene in a predictable, controllable way that the photographer could 'visualize' while looking at the scene, days, months or years before a final print might be made.
Today’s photographer, with a fully automated camera, has largely eschewed the zone system as a complicated, archaic, black and white 'film' system. While in reality the zone system is a practical, applicable system that could save digital photographers from themselves (and over-processing) if only they spent a bit of time learning to use it.
There are a few changes that have to be made to the zone system in a digital world. The system has to be reversed; the precedent has been set for this by colour transparency film. The major change that must be made is to expose for the highlights rather than the shadows and to then process/print for the shadows. The technical nuances of the zone system would take a book to explain but by making this simple switch the rest of the zone system is applicable to digital photography and inkjet printing.
The largest hindrance to the use of the zone system currently is the need for careful record-keeping, metering and absolute technical knowledge of the equipment. Careful metering is almost a forgotten art, equipment goes untested and record keeping, while easier than ever thanks to metadata is not something I see photographers doing with digital media. If a photographer does learn to meter, tests their equipment and keeps records of their shooting/processing/printing, the zone system will provide the ultimate in control of digital images just as it did with black and white sheet film (and significantly more than roll film thanks to digital images ability to process each frame individually).
While Ansel Adams and Fred Archer designed the zone system for black and white sheet film, people like Galen Rowell recognized its universal usefulness and used it successfully, along with graduated neutral density filters of his own design, with colour roll film to produce stunning images. Galen was the next Ansel Adams in many ways. We now need someone to bring the zone system and that type of ingenuity to digital. So if Galen was the next Ansel, who will be the next Galen Rowell?
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Some foood for thought. This was an article I was assigned for school and is exactly 500 words in length. Hopefully I got my point across, if not all the technical details.
I'll be back. Later.
