The point of previsualizing was very important when shooting film, particularly 8x10 sheet film in the time that Ansel Adams invented the Zone System. It's less important now since with a digital camera you can make an exposure and check it, using in-camera analysis tools, for focus and exposure right on the spot ... And you can make a near-infinite number of exposures at no cost. But in a day when every time you made an exposure you consumed a $5 piece of recording media and you could only carry so much media at any time, making sure your exposures were correct was extremely important.
The fundamental notion of the Zone System is very simple: expose for the shadows, process for the highlights. It breaks the range of tones into 10 zones so that you can analyze the scene and know where to place the exposure and establish the processing baseline for when you get back to the lab. Updating this to the digital era, with today's tools, you can learn how not to be a machine gunner with a camera and achieve good exposures with a notion of how to process them before you get to the computer. But few people today have the patience to work this way, it seems. Most just stick their camera on high speed continuous capture and autobracket for seven exposures at a stop apart, figuring they can "fix" anything that way. Such silliness is a mockery of photography, in my opinion. On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 7:47 PM, Eric Weir <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Dec 2, 2010, at 8:24 PM, Godfrey DiGiorgi wrote: > >> Another resource that comes to mind is to drop by a used bookstore and >> hunt up a copy of the old classic "Basic Photography" published by >> Focal Press in the 1960s. Invaluable information at whatever level of >> depth you can tolerate. > > I picked up a copy of a book on the zone system by Minor White from the '40s > at Wings [used cameras and stuff] that I skim while eating breakfast. Greek > to me at this point. Main question right now: What's the point of > previsualization if in the end you've got one focus, one aperture, one > shutter speed, one ISO? I can see compensating to bring out detail in one > area of the scene or to avoid overexposure in another, but not more than that. > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Eric Weir > Decatur, GA USA > [email protected] > > > > > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. > -- Godfrey godfreydigiorgi.posterous.com -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
