[Leica] zones

["Rod Fleming" <rodfleming@sol.co.uk>]

  Hi


On Sunday, 26 Dec, Ted Grant wrote, in a response to my post of 23 Dec

>you know all this zone stuff is great if you're shooting one sheet of film
>or one roll of film


Obviously too much Christmas trifle then, Ted, or you'd have noticed that in
the post you refer to I wrote:

"The fact is that you can indeed use the extended
scale that the full Zone system allows, but really it is only practical on a
view camera using sheet film"


'Nuff said.........

Ted also wrote

>It's never been my thing to be involved with it, <


Does not matter how good or how experienced you are, there's always room to
learn some more. I kinda dislike the suggestion that I'm a "rock"
photographer BTW. Yes I do photograph rocks and trees (usually on 5x4) but
it doesn't pay; most of my money comes from photojournalism, if you like to
call it that.....Though personally I see no difference; it's just two facets
of the same craft. But just as a woodworker will use different chisels for
different jobs, we use different cameras, film and technique for different
situations.

I will make the point again; the Zone System is a teaching aid, not a rule
to be slavishly followed in all situations. And "Expose for the shadows and
develop for the highlights" has been around longer than the Zone System.

I'm not pretending that I use the full Zone System for sport, or action, or
news photography-  I am agreeing with Jim that if I go out and the light is
flat as a pancake I routinely underexpose/overdevelop, and if it's brassy
bright, the opposite. Film is cheap, and I don't mind swapping if the
situation warrants it. What I'm talking about is training the eye to see
light and to respond to it. I'm talking about "previsualing"- just a  fancy
term for having some idea of what your image will finally look like at the
moment when you hit the tit!

As a matter of interest, many years ago, when I was learning this business,
I worked in the darkroom of a national newspaper here (Years later I became
Picture Editor on its sister paper, but that's another story.) While I was
in the darkroom I had to print the work of some of the finest photographers
I have ever known - but I'll tell you something, Ted- those who knew
something about sensitometry produced negs that were a damn sight easier to
print! (Oh, they didn't call it sensitometry, they called it "knowing the
light" , but it came to the same thing.)

The thing is, in the field, using 35mm, an experienced photog can look at
the light around him, the subject he's photographing, take the meter
reading, and then say, "Hmm, not sure about that, I'll give it an extra 1/2
stop" or summat like- when you're working at speed on 35mm using TTL, you
don't really even think about it- you just do it. Or you can be working with
cameras without meters and see the light drop a 1/2 stop or so- and do
something about it.

But translating that intuitive response, developed over years of practice,
into something that a less experienced photog can use is not easy, and the
Zone System is one way (not the only way) that can greatly help. At its most
basic it teaches people to think about what constitutes a highlight and a
shadow, and what are the relative qualities of the two.

Pro photogs- especially if like me you've been lucky enough to spend most of
your career working for large circulation newspapers and magazines- get to
try out a lot of different situations and squirt off a lot of film- all paid
for very handsomely by someone else. Most folks don't get to do that, and
any aid to the learning process has to be a good thing.

If I may move on to another point, during the seventies and early eighties
most colour photogs became slaves to the tyranny of the tranny.- Now, I like
tranny a lot, but the fact is that it takes away from the photographer a
great deal of the craft of photography. Generally you have no control over
the processing of the film, and the scale is quite short- this led photogs
to think that using a grey card, or the incident metering system, which
assumes that the world reflects 18% in all situations- was ideal. Well,
these systems will give consistent results, there's no doubt about it; but
it should be obvious that there is a huge qualitative difference between a
misty overcast winter light and the bright light of noonday summer- which
these methods are completely incapable of discerning.

Because photogs were unable to manipulate their technique to suit the light,
some pretty awful things happened- look at any book of fashion pics from the
fifties or sixties and revel in the dramatic handling of light- then look at
the pics from a couple of decades later and see how everything became flat
and directionless- as a result of photogs trying to accommodate the
characteristics of the tranny film then in use.

At the same time, the use of fill-flash (argh) became almost standard. I
remember going on a colour training course for the paper I was then working
on- can't remember the year, but we had just moved into colour, and the
medium was tranny. The advice- in short, hit everything with a flash! Ugh.

As I said, I love using tranny- when the light is right to maximise its
virtues. But thankfully over the last decade colour neg emulsions have been
developed which produce results in print which are as good as tranny, and
digitisation has given back to the colour photog a great deal of the control
that has always been the privilege of the mono worker. In this context,
photogs can look again at their technique, and use the knowledge to liberate
themselves, and hopefully produce better work.

Hell, anything that can help get rid of the universal fill-flash has to be a
good thing!


Cheers


Rod