Too many Zones?

[jeff_white1]

It was Ansel who said that "Dodging and burning are to make up for

Gods inaccuracy in establishing tonal relationships." Most beginners

in the Zone System think that everything should fit in 10 zones, that

is just limiting yourself. Local contrast is just as important as the

whole subject brightness range. I would not screw up the local

contrast of an image just to make sure the sunlit clouds fall on zone

VIII or IX. It is a fallacy to think that you make it "all" happen on

the negative. Isn't it funny that most of the "greats" that are

talked about on this forum are also great printers. Getting the

needed information on the negative is what the zone system is about.

Making the print that has the look and feel you want is an extension

of that. If I am making a negative and something falls on zone XII

and I choose to leave it there, that is telling me in the

previsualization process that I need to take steps in printing to

make it fall in the reproduceable range of the paper. Lower paper

contrast, flashing, contrast masking and burning are few ways to

accomplish this feat.

[james___]

When I go into the White Mnts. to shoot Bristle Cone pines or into the

Four Corners region to shoot canyon scenes, I typically run into an

extreme range of subject brightnesses that I somehow must render as 5

stops of tonality in able to render them successfully on a print. The

shadowed places within the trees are at times zone II and the

brilliant clouds are zone 10-12. Some of the interiors of ruins are in

the zone III range whereas the canyon walls outside the overhangs are

zone VIII or more. Or the rim top ruins interiors are EV 4 and the

clouds are EV 12. The point of previsualization is knowing what you

have to start with and knowing where you want to end up. Getting there

is where the problem ,and fun, lies. All of the methods outlined above

are steps necassary to begin to accomplish the task. The paper is

always the bottleneck. It can see 5 tonal zones(7 with AZO I think).

that is what AA and all the early pioneers where talking about when

they started formulating the Zone System. All the meter does is give a

consistent place to start. It renders everything that gets into it's

field of view as zone 5 or a middle tone. If I point it at the bright

sands of New Mexico and the bright clouds I will have at times a 1 or

2 stop range. The meter tells me it's between EV15 and EV 16. If I

leave it there, it will be as flat as a pancake and print as a mid

grey with no separation. Or I can expand it to 5 stops ( which is all

the paper can give me) but still have 5 zones more info with which I

could play with. The neg can see 15-17 stops of density but the paper

can only use 5 at any time. I have a negative that takes 20 minutes to

print. And it prints 5 stops of tonality beautifully but you can't see

a 100 watt light through the density. So yes Martha, there are more

than 10 zones of density but paper only lets you use 5 of them on any

one image. That's the beauty of B&W material. Lots of variables and

lots of ways to use them. Learn all of it so you can really express

yourself. James

[struan_gray]

The biggest problem with the zone system is sloppy nomenclature. The

zone folk I know will call a white wall Zone VIII and green grass Zone

V independently of whether they are talking about scene brightness,

negative density, or print reflectance. It works in practice, but can

lead to confusion in the classroom as both the absolute and the

relative values of the physical quantities involved vary as you move

from scene to negative to print.

 

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To me, the Zone system has two useful stages. The first is getting

the scene information onto the film without compressing or clipping

the highlights and/or losing detail in the shadows. The second is

getting that information onto your favourite printing paper so that

the scene is reproduced with the tonal values you want. Because there

is only so much you can do in the darkroom, your knowledge of the

second process then feeds back into and influences the first. The

best, simplest and most useful explanation of the whole system I have

seen was in the Silverprint catalogue (www.silverprint.co.uk).

 

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In a scene, zones are seperated by full stops on a reflected light

meter. It's easy to get zones higher than VIII, even if we ignore

such things as specular reflections, geographical altitude and

latitude, and the eccentricity of the earth's orbit. It's easy

because zone VIII is not an absolute brightness standard, but

corresponds to whatever object in the scene you want to appear

white-with-some-detail in the final print.

 

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If you choose a white wall in shadow to be zone VIII, then a nearby

one in sunlight will land on a higher zone. Alternatly, with enough

blackout cloth you can create objects in your scene with brightnesses

down to minus infinity. If you make one of the low-lying ones white

on the print, the walls end up on Zones J and J+1, where J is a large

number. The limited dynamic range of the human eye usually stops you

taking this to extremes, but it can be fun to try.

 

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Interestingly enough, with high-bit digitisation you get good tonal

resolution over a much larger range of negative densities than is

possible with printing papers, even self-masking ones like POP and

Pt/Pd. Some of the fine art hybrid digital/analogue B+W crowd prefer

long straight line films like T-max since they can over-expose

highlights to their hearts content without blocking up, and then add

shoulders and toes anywhere they like in post-processing before output

to paper.

 

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I can't resist a comment on IR. It is perfectly possible for bodies

to turn visible light into IR (a.k.a. the greenhouse effect) but the

wavelengths emitted are too long to register on either film or

photographic meters. The IR that fools your meter and mutates the

colours of your bluebells is reflected sunlight with wavelengths from

0.7-1.0 microns. If you want to know if a particular material or

subject will cause trouble, the important parameter is the near-IR

reflectivity, not the emissivity at longer wavelengths. The two are

related, but only those familiar with Hilbert Transforms and complex

dielectric functions would call the relationship simple. You can

selectively cut these wavelenths with a dichroic 'hot' mirror or with

a near-IR filter.