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Ansel Easton Adams was a pioneering American landscape photographer who was born in 1902 and died in 1984. He had a fantastic career that included working for the US Department of the Interior to photograph the country’s many national parks. Ansel Adams was pivotal in founding the photography department at the famous New York Museum of Modern Art and he helped to set up the popular magazine Aperture as well as the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona. In 1980 Ansel Adams was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his contributions to photography, art and conservation throughout the course of his spectacular life.
As a member of the Sierra Club he was passionate about environmental issues and conservation but he is best known for his highly technical use of the camera. Ansel Adams became famous for his Zone System which is still used to this day to help photographers make the most of their cameras capabilities.
Ansel Adams and the Zone System.
Developed in the late 1930’s, the Zone System is a way that photographers can systematically and accurately determine the correct image values of a photo. The image values of a photo are related to the light and dark values within the image.
Adams originally formulated the method in black and white photography to help the photographer achieve the desired brightness levels in the finished product. This was more difficult in the days before digital photography because the photographer had to expose their images using a dark room and had to be more careful when taking the photo to get the exposure values correct.
Why Use the Zone System?
- The Zone System will help you to get the right exposure in your photo each time even when the lighting is bad or difficult to work with.
- The system tells you when you should be using an optical lens filter, such as a graduated neutral density filter to get the right levels of brightness in your shots.
- Allows you to accurately evaluate the tones and dynamic range in the scene before you take your photo.
- Lets you know when you need to use a fill flash to get the right exposure in your photograph.
What is the Zone System and How Does it Work?
The zone system is a technique that uses a spectrum going from dark to light, divided into tonal zones, that allows you to accurately assess the brightness of the scene you are photographing so you can make the necessary configurations on your camera to adjust for it. Each of these zones, 0-10, is assigned a tonal range, with 10 being the lightest and 0 being pure black.
Each zone is 1 stop different from the one before it. So for example zone 3 is 1 stop darker than zone 4. The middle zone, zone 5, is the correct balance of light and dark, and has an 18% reflectance value. Using this system allowed photographers to avoid over or under exposing their photographs.
Digital Photography and the Zone System.
In the modern world of digital photography the zone system still applies and is often used by professional photographers. With a digital camera anything below zone 2 or even 3 would be rendered as a black screen while anything above zone 7 or 8 would come out as white. For this reason the digital photographer mainly needs to pay attention to the tonal ranges between zone 3 and 7.
Color and the Zone System.
As you can see from the colorized zone system chart below, the colors in zone 5 are correct. If you go up in progressive steps (from zone 5 to zone 10) then the color becomes over-exposed and conversely, under-exposed as you go down steps from zone 5 (example zone 5 to zone 0).
To use the zone system you need to balance the scene with the image you want to get. This means that for a picture of a bright snowy mountain, you would place the scene in zone 7. Then, using your camera’s meter reading you can change the exposure correspondingly.
The Exposure Value (EV) is divided up into units called ‘f-stops’. This can be controlled by changing the aperture on your camera. Changing the aperture on your camera changes the size of the lens at the front, meaning that more or less light will enter, and therefore controls the exposure value, or brightness, of the final image. You’ll see it marked on the camera’s LCD screen as ‘f/2.8’ for example, or sometimes F2.8 (both mean the same thing).
For our example of a bright snowy mountain that we have placed in zone 7, we would need to move our exposure value down by 2 f-stops. This is because zone 7 is two tonal ranges above zone 5, which is where we want our final picture to fall.
Conversely, if you were taking a photograph of some dark woods and foliage then you would place the scene into zone 3 or 4. Presuming we chose to place the dark woods into zone 4, then we would need to move our exposure value up by 1 f-stop, to bring the scene up from zone 4 into zone 5.
Practice the Zone System.
It’s going to take you some time to get used to doing this but you’ll soon get the hang of it! To help you master the technique try taking photos of scenes that are badly light or very bright. This will mean that you get used to operating on the extremes of the tonal range and as you get better at controlling the exposure move towards the central tonal ranges and get used to making finer adjustments to the camera’s exposure values.
What do you think of the zone system?
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