<p>How did Ansel Adams capture one his most famous images, <em>Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico</em>?</p>
<p>What I would like to know:</p>
<p>OK, they drove around the American West, found themselves in the New Mexican desert, Adams suddenly saw something he had to photograph, they frantically got out, pulled the equipment, not having a meter, he perfectly chose the perfect exposure.</p>
<p>But how did he do it? Digging up a bit about this, I find two accounts. He had a <em>Weston Master</em> meter and the meter metered the Moon and the distant peaks on where<em> A</em> lay on that meter's scale. I wish I had a picture of that meter to understand what that meant. The foreground was on <em>U</em>.</p>
<p>The other account states that Ansel Adams knew the luminance of the moon, 250 candles per square feet, which is around 2700 lux in SI units, put the Moon in Zone VII and voilà!<br /><br /> One retelling of that tale states that what Ansel knew about the Moon was actually a version of the “ƒ/16 rule”. Does anyone know the precise formulation of that rule as applied to the Moon?<br /><br /> <br /> So how did Ansel convert <em>A </em>and <em>U</em> / 250 footcandles in exposure settings, especially how did he place the 250 footcandles using something known as <em>Exposure Formula</em> into Zone VII?<br /><br /> <br /> What type of (8 × 10) in. camera did he use?<br /><br /> <br /> In the technical information about the development, I found this:</p>
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<p><br /> … dilute D-23 and ten developer to water sequences.</p>
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<p><br /> What does “dilute ten developer to water sequences” mean? </p>