Vanessa Joseph
December 12, 2014
Zone System
Period 6
Zone System A zone system is a system by which you understand and control every level of light and dark to your best advantage. It works in digital just as it does for sheet film. Having a system allows you to understand and be in control, instead of taking whatever you get. Ansel Adams was asked in the 1950’s if he thought the Zone System was still relevant in that then-modern world. He replied “If you don’t use the Zone System, what system will you use to know what you’ve got as you photograph?” There are many ways to evaluate what you’ll get in your final print or display as you photograph. The Zone System is one way to get a handle on everything. When you know what you’re going to get you can make changes as you’re photographing to optimize your final prints. The Zone System applies as much to color, digital and video as it does to black-and-white. Ansel Adams even shows us in The Negative how to use it with point and shoot cameras! Ansel Adams chose to divide the range between white and black into about ten zones. Each is an f/stop apart. Color film and digital tend to have fewer zones, but that’s not important. What’s important is understanding how these zones relate to one another and how they change as they go through ach step of any photographic process. From the 1970s through today, the Zone System for film became more involved with printing as people tended to shoot rolls of sheet film that are developed all at once and printed on variable contrast paper. With digital in the 100s the Zone System focuses more on understanding how digital cameras respond to different levels of light and dark The Zone System is the basis of understand PhotoShop’s Curves command. With digital cameras you set contrast in-camera. The