Zone system and roll film

[Charles E. Dunlap <cdunlap@rupture.ucsc.edu>]

Some here have been criticizing the utility of the zone system for roll 
film users. Others, rightly, have defended it. I didn't get acceptable 
results until I put the zone system into practice in my 35mm work. I 
learned from Ansel Adams's chapter in an early seventies Leica Manual. He 
clearly describes the practical sensitometry that the zone system 
provides and how to apply it to roll film. He wasn't a curmudgeonly man 
who thought that only large format photographs had value, and the zone 
system is not purely an exposure system. As he emphasized over and over, 
the zone system requires that we have a mental image of what we want to 
see in the photograph and the system provides a sound method for 
obtaining that result.

-Charlie

Charles E. Dunlap
Earth Sciences Dept.
University of California
Santa Cruz, CA 95064