Essentials of the exposure, Part I - Introduction

For lack of a comprehensive guide to exposing a photograph, except perhaps Ansel Adams famous trilogy, this blog is born. I will try to assemble here, from my own experience and materials gathered from others, a step by step guide to the zone system that will be comprehensible and useful to both the masters and the inexperienced. A bold challenge indeed.

In this age where every camera has AE, one might ask, "why start from exposure not composition?" This is the question I have asked myself too. It is perhaps easier to assemble a guide to composition rules but in the end, composition is more of an art than exposure is. Although the novice will undoubtedly be bored by lengthy (I assure you that there will be many parts on this) and somewhat technical discussions on exposure, I feel that in the end, exposure will be easier to master than composition.

One of the most vigourous treatments of exposure was provided by the master photographer, Ansel Adams, in the form of the zone system. The zone system was a system which enabled the photographer to determine all the necessary steps in order to create his/her desired print. Emphasis was that all the steps from exposure, development and printing were of equal importance to the final product, the print. Too often, digital photographers fail to realise this relying too heavily on post processing to achieve the desired print. Make no mistake, Ansel believed that each print should be processed differently. He would be an advocate of digital manipulation if he were born in our age but the fact is that digital or darkroom manipulation will never fully correct for mistakes made during the exposure.

The subsequent articles will discuss the exposure part of the zone system in the context of digital colour photos. While b&w images illustrate the concept of zones and tones better, most b&w photos straight out of the camera are rather unattractive and require post processing which complicates our discussion of exposure. (Even from this early stage, it becomes evident that exposure and post processing are intertwined.) Given that we do not operate digital cameras in fully manual mode all the time, the discussion of exposure will use terms such as exposure compensation, but keep in mind that +1EV is moving the exposure 1 zone up from what the meter suggests [zone V] and the -EVs are the opposite.

Ansel said in 1981, that

“I believe the electronic image will be the next major advance. Such systems will have their own inherent and inescapable structural characteristics, and the artist and functional practitioner will again strive to comprehend and control them.”

And it is with this in mind that we will explore the "inherent and inescapable structural characteristics" of the digital image in the articles to come.