The Zone System

[Dan76]

Okay everyone, this might be a stupid question to those more educated in the history of photography, but it's new to me! I've been reading about Ansel Adams today, and the zone system that he developed - to me, it pretty much reads like the birth of HDR, but obviously in an analogue sense - am I right in thinking that?

I'd dearly love to have seen what Mr Adams could've done with a full frame/medium format digital system! It would've saved him having to lug all those big heavy cameras around Yosemite Park too

 

[unclened]

i would say that it has some relevance to hdr but not entirely. To me the zone system means understanding the way a digital sensor will want to expose a scene on its own and then adjusting it by exposing the scene based on a zone/scale. i.e. white snow should be exposed at around +2EV, because the camera sensor will be fooled into thinking the scene is very well lit and bright and will generally underexpose the scene by 2EV. Taking this one step further, sometimes complex scenes cannot be captured by the dynamic range available in a camera's sensor, so two or more images have to be merged into one. But it is the understanding of the zone system and how to expose the two differently that applies mainly to HDR.

 

[HoppyUK]

Okay everyone, this might be a stupid question to those more educated in the history of photography, but it's new to me! I've been reading about Ansel Adams today, and the zone system that he developed - to me, it pretty much reads like the birth of HDR, but obviously in an analogue sense - am I right in thinking that?

I'd dearly love to have seen what Mr Adams could've done with a full frame/medium format digital system! It would've saved him having to lug all those big heavy cameras around Yosemite Park too

I think that's dead right. The Zone System is all about HDR and if you look at AA's fabulous prints you can see it clearly enough.

There are two aspects to it, firstly centering the exposure around one key tone, and then processing the negative and print to maximise and compress the dynamic range either side of it, so it fits the (limited) dynamic range of a paper print. Neither aspect is really applicable to digital photography, which is fundamentally different. Digital is more like shooting slide film, but even that is different too.

In terms of exposure, the Expose To The Right (of the histogram) technique is similar to the principle of the Zone System in that it aims to maximise the amount of data recorded by the sensor, but that's about it.

If AA was around today, I'm sure he'd have the largest format digital camera he could get hold of, and would be using both ETTR and HDR techniques.