Re: the zone system vs. the Big Picture

[Gary J Toop <gtoop@uoguelph.ca>]

On Sun, 21 Apr 1996, Jack Campin wrote:

SNIP
> I had a few specific kinds of photograph in mind here:
> 
> - auto-triggered wildlife photography (where you may well use colour neg
>   film, but certainly not a point & shoot).
> 
> - the Hail Mary technique (hold the camera over your head to get above the
>   crowd), which has worked fine for news photographers since about when the
>   Leica was introduced, and where decent optics does no harm at all and a
>   point & shoot will almost certainly get the focus wrong.
> 
> - the sort of situation that arises in sports photography and political
>   demonstrations, where you just have to fire the shutter at the moment
>   of the tackle and take what you get.
> 
> You can make intelligent guesses about exposure in all these situations,
> but you can't stop black animals taking your bait or guarantee to render
> the highlights on that riotshield correctly...

	I think that the key word here is "intelligent" guesses.  I think 
that to guess intelligently it helps to have an a basic understanding of 
how the film sees light.  You certainly do not have to worry about any 
particular "Zone" within that image, but only the general characteristics 
of the image as a whole.  Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, you 
need to have worked out a system for developing your film which works for 
you in your darkroom:  you're much more likely to get results that make 
you happy from your intelligent guesses if you know what your film 
will do when you take it into the darkroom and, equally importantly, you 
are more likely to be able to compensate for guesses that go awry.  As 
the others have pointed out, that is really all that the Zone system does 
for you, at least as presented by Adams. 
 
	Remember that the original poster had an exposure/development 
problem.   The first 2 or 3 chapters of "The Negative" (which is all 
that I recommended) or the beginning of Fred Picker's book "The 
Zone VI Workshop" provide a very simple means of diagnosing the source of 
the problem and do so by providing the reader with a very simple 
conceptual grasp of how light, film, and development interact to produce 
images.  Armed with that understanding, the person can work out the 
method of exposing and developing their film that best suits their 
shooting habits, whether they grab shots with no time for or interest in 
previsualization or they spend 2 hours planning and setting up each 
shot.  The point is to get as good a negative as your circumstances and 
the limitations that go with them permit, where "good" simply means "able 
to do what you want it to do".

Gary Toop