Ansel Adams Zone System Digital Free (Page 2): My students are assigned to shoot 20 frames of the same subject during their zone system exercise.. Cheers and best to you.

gwilliams6

larryepage wrote:

The key is shooting 20 exposures of the same scene. Mixing and matching generally doesn't work anywhere near as well.

My students are assigned to shoot 20 frames of the same subject during their zone system exercise..

Cheers and best to you.

gwilliams6

scaudill wrote:

Beautiful images

Thanks,

gwilliams6

dpullum wrote:

Yes, my motto about shooting many comes from taking one shot of a partially sunken 30' wooden fishing boat in a canal in Argentina. The boat had such a "days gone by" look. The inpatient group was not interested in my adjusting exposure, laying on the bank in several places, etc... snap and move on was the unfortunate necessity.

PS: gwilliams6 beautiful photos.

Thanks,

Robin Dessureau

Glad to see the Zone System is alive and well. I started using and learning the System back in 1976 for sheet film and a modified version for roll film with the exposed and film development time varied to compress or expand the tonal range using spot meter readings prior to exposure. Now that we are digital our cameras do HDR which is similar to the Zone Systems by taking multi shots at different exposers and combining them or RAW files can be combined in post-production photo software where a similar process can be done with what you did in a darkroom. I like the fact that even with digital we can expand or compress an image vision as the tech improves and changes.

Markag

I used to haul around an 18% grey card and metered that. Whatever happened to that approach?

BebuLamar

gwilliams6 wrote:

I have a couple of Adams prints made by his son from the original negatives, given to me as a wedding present in the 90"s. They have long outlasted that marriage, LOL

.

Really Adams has only one son Dr. Micheal Adams and I don't think he made prints.

gwilliams6

I am not Ansel Adams, but here is a shot I made of Yosemite Valley, in Yosemite National Park. This is called the tunnel view. (left) El Capitan, (center-rear) Half Dome with a small rising moon, (right) Bridal Veil Falls. Then a closer up shot of Bridal Veil falls from another vantage point in the Valley. These were shot in raw with my 61mp Sony A7RIV and Sigma Art 24-70mm f2.8 DG DN lens, and processed in LR into high quality jpegs.

So I will post the original processed raw into color jpeg (reduced in resolution to go along with UHH size limitations) . Then I will post the resultant jpeg when I converted them to Black and White in LR. It is an easy one click conversion that does retain the dynamic range and details in the shadows and highlights of the high quality jpegs.

There are still many tonal adjustments in LR that I could do to these B&W conversions, but I am just showing them here without moving any of the many sliders.

Click on download to see better image quality.

Cheer and best to you all.

(Download)

rmalarz Loc: Tempe, Arizona

That works but more precise measurements of the actual scene will render better results.

The grey card works well with roll films.

Markag wrote:

I used to haul around an 18% grey card and metered that. Whatever happened to that approach?

Markag

My Z7 has "picture controls" that modify even the RAW files.
Thinking maybe an experiment with shutting off the controls, if its possible, and acquiring an 18% card might be interesting. I'm not sure what a digital camera meters spot meter is calibrated to read?

rmalarz Loc: Tempe, Arizona

An example of TZS applied to digital. It took me some time to discover how to apply it to digital. After that, some lab work and we were off. It turns out to be a bit more precise than the adage "expose to the right".

To do this requires one to do structured testing of their camera. A practice some find difficult to approach with enthusiasm. Additionally, I found it's not a one size fits all. Each digital camera needs to be tested and note the exposure adjustments effect of that particular camera.
--Bob

dpullum wrote:

Works for color, but for BW, it analyzes the shade of gray into zones as in the Ansel Adams zone system. I worked with it years ago. This year it was resurrected by open-source org...
The Zone System is a photographic technique for determining optimal film exposure and development, formulated by Ansel Adams and Fred Archer in 1941. Many man-hours in the darkroom for Ansel Adams's landscapes made him forever famous; few shared his passion and patience.

The 11 zones in Ansel Adams’ system were defined to represent the gradation of all the different tonal values you would see in a black and white print, with zone 5 being middle gray, zone 0 being pure black (with no detail), and zone 10 being pure white (with no detail). Theoretically, each zone represents one f-stop in exposure. You’ll also notice there is then an 11-stop difference between pure black and pure white, with a 7-stop difference between the darkest black with detail and the lightest white with detail."

Wikipedia reports that "In mid-September, 2011, the Light Crafts website went offline without notice. It was reported that Fabio Riccardi, founder of Light Crafts and the primary developer of LightZone, was now working as an Apple.

Good News the zone system was reborn This is especially useful for IR with 720+ nm filter that yields BW images as well as those who love B&W photography. I had it years ago and I started a search... Photoshop has it version that only works in Photoshop. That prompted me to search, I found my old copy in my programs and that gave some direction but I encountered many dead ends until success... I found it and the free download.

"A zone preview at the top of the column divides the image into zones corresponding to these shades of gray. You can use the Zone Mapper to stretch or compress individual tonal ranges, and you will see the changes reflected in both the Zones preview and the image. [Isolates particular zones, shades, as I recall and leaves other zones alone]
By default, the settings are applied to your image globally, but there is also the Regions tool, which allows you to isolate areas of the image and apply corrections only to them. You can draw areas in the form of polygons, splines or Bezier curves."

Works for color, but for BW, it analyzes the shade... (show quote)

SOOC

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Processed
Processed...

(Download)

SOOC
SOOC...

(Download)

Processed
Processed...

(Download)

gwilliams6

Markag wrote:

My Z7 has "picture controls" that modify even the RAW files.
Thinking maybe an experiment with shutting off the controls, if its possible, and acquiring an 18% card might be interesting. I'm not sure what a digital camera meters spot meter is calibrated to read?

Even a digital camera's spot meter is calibrated to an 18% grey card reading, that is the standard, a neutral grey.

Cheers

JohnSwanda Loc: San Francisco

BebuLamar wrote:

Really Adams has only one son Dr. Micheal Adams and I don't think he made prints.

Maybe he's thinking of Edward Weston, whose son printed his photos after he passed.

srg

dpullum wrote:

Works for color, but for BW, it analyzes the shade of gray into zones as in the Ansel Adams zone system. I worked with it years ago. This year it was resurrected by open-source org...
The Zone System is a photographic technique for determining optimal film exposure and development, formulated by Ansel Adams and Fred Archer in 1941. Many man-hours in the darkroom for Ansel Adams's landscapes made him forever famous; few shared his passion and patience.

The 11 zones in Ansel Adams’ system were defined to represent the gradation of all the different tonal values you would see in a black and white print, with zone 5 being middle gray, zone 0 being pure black (with no detail), and zone 10 being pure white (with no detail). Theoretically, each zone represents one f-stop in exposure. You’ll also notice there is then an 11-stop difference between pure black and pure white, with a 7-stop difference between the darkest black with detail and the lightest white with detail."

Wikipedia reports that "In mid-September, 2011, the Light Crafts website went offline without notice. It was reported that Fabio Riccardi, founder of Light Crafts and the primary developer of LightZone, was now working as an Apple.

Good News the zone system was reborn This is especially useful for IR with 720+ nm filter that yields BW images as well as those who love B&W photography. I had it years ago and I started a search... Photoshop has it version that only works in Photoshop. That prompted me to search, I found my old copy in my programs and that gave some direction but I encountered many dead ends until success... I found it and the free download.

"A zone preview at the top of the column divides the image into zones corresponding to these shades of gray. You can use the Zone Mapper to stretch or compress individual tonal ranges, and you will see the changes reflected in both the Zones preview and the image. [Isolates particular zones, shades, as I recall and leaves other zones alone]
By default, the settings are applied to your image globally, but there is also the Regions tool, which allows you to isolate areas of the image and apply corrections only to them. You can draw areas in the form of polygons, splines or Bezier curves."

Works for color, but for BW, it analyzes the shade... (show quote)

Progress in photography ended with Ansel Adams. If he were alive today he would eschew color entirely.
Just like the Amish will accept the wheel as long as there is no motor involved.

JohnSwanda Loc: San Francisco

srg wrote:

Progress in photography ended with Ansel Adams. If he were alive today he would eschew color entirely.
Just like the Amish will accept the wheel as long as there is no motor involved.

AA did shoot some color, but he didn't feel he had the control he did with B&W. I think he would have embraced the precise control of color digital offers, but would have stayed with film for B&W.

gwilliams6

JohnSwanda wrote:

Maybe he's thinking of Edward Weston, whose son printed his photos after he passed.

The Adams prints were a gift and the photo editor at my newspaper who gave them to me as a wedding present said they were printed from the original negatives by his son. This editor was known to lie if it suited him in the moment, so I am sure he got it wrong, LOL.

But the prints have authenticated Ansel Adams certifications on their back as being printed from the original negatives. Who actually printed them from the original negatives I dont really know for certainty. Since I moved from my large house in New Jersey where they were framed and hung on the wall, to a very small house in Texas to take care of my 97 year old mom, these two Adams prints have been in archival box storage, along with some other work. If I ever get them back out of storage , I will photograph the front and back and post it in this thread.

Cheers