At 05:34 PM 8/2/1998 +1000, you wrote:
>>Are you saying that if keying on a highlight you would take a spot
>>reading and find the Zone V placement (18 0ray) for that spot and then
>>open up 2 stops, etc.?
>>
>
>
>Okay, what's Zone V?
>
>Foxy
>
Hi Foxy,
It's explained by the parenthesis: 18 0ray. If you stuck a gray card in a
shot and perfectly exposed for the gray card, the exposure should be dead
on under normal circumstances. In the zone system the gray card value is
Zone V. Your hand is one stop higher up the scale (Zone VI). Cumulus
clouds are in the Zone VII neighborhood, and your white T-shirt on a sunny
16 day would probably be a Zone VIII. Shadows would be Zones II and III.
These are logarithmic, i.e., one stop difference per zone. It's still a
useful way of thinking about exposure even though as, Ansel Adams
articulated it, it is most powerful as a way of visualizing the exposure
through to the final print -- B&W print of course.
There are 10 zones that represent the range of sensitivity of most B&W
film. Printing paper can deal with up to Zone VIII before it blocks out.
Adams takes great pains to explain how to expose and process film to
optimize the print, most of which is extremely difficult to use with 35mm
in B&W and is just lost because we have so few choices with color film.
Still one can do things like flash color film to sensitize and bring up the
Zone II areas of a print, etc. But it all depends first upon knowing where
you are going to place Zone V. Incidentally (pun intended), this is one of
the reasons why Adams recommended a spot meter, since averaging and
incident light meters may not give you precisely the right information
about what you are visualizing as a Zone V. So placing the Zone V value
also entails implicitly placement of all the other Zone values as well.
Actually, I think Adams would have liked the 4T. I'm not sure he would
have used it in quite the way people have been describing it.
Long answer. Sorry.
Joel
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