Much has been said about the Zone System since the days Ansel Adams went to spread the word to the public. So much in fact, that it shouldn’t really matter if I add a few drops to the flood, so here it goes:

I believe that photography should be a spontaneous and intuitive process and that’s why I was in the beginning skeptical about this whole theory business. Zoning a beautiful scene in front of me down to fragments and bits seemed to act a bit like a mad surgeon on the operating slab. I was rather surprised that it was nothing like that at all. I actually save time now and get predictable results – and this is what I like very much!

So how do I go about it? Well  - there are only three things that I seem to need to know. First: I control the shadows on my negative (near transparent areas) with the length of exposure, second: I control the highlights (dense areas) on my negative with the length of it’s development and third: the light meter is calibrated to a 18% value representing medium gray (Zone V). Everything starts from here. What I do now is simply to look for the shadow within the scene I framed and determine the detail I want to have represented of it in my print. I then rate it from a scale from 0 to 10. Zero [0] standing for maximum black and Ten [X] for absolute white – with 5 [V] containing equal parts of each, thus being ‘neutral’ gray (the partition into these ten zones is essentially a simplification necessary to accommodate nature to the limited receptive range of photographic film/paper). And that’s basically all the theory that I require! To set it to work using my equipment is the second and mechanical part. I own a basic digital spot meter, that shows the aperture/time setting for every reading and with two useful buttons I can go up and down the ladder to see this metered combination over an aperture range that covers the mechanics of my lens. The procedure (setting up the camera and framing the scene accomplished) is then the following: I meter a shadowy scene and place it within a Zone. This reading will be generally lower then medium gray V, which means I have to give it less exposure because it is darker – (the value that the meter shows would mean the shadow would be represented as medium gray, that is - too bright). Let’s say for example, I determine that the very dark tree bark in front of me is a Zone II bark. Zone II bark has merely discernable detail and is actually three Zones darker then what the meter reading shows. I memorize that the difference of II and V is 3 while I push the buttons on my meter till I arrive on the aperture value that I’d like to use for the exposure. Then I step down those three steps and I now I have the time I need for my bark. If this value should be within the films normal sensitivity range then fine, if not then I have to compensate for reciprocity error. Thereafter I adjust the lens mechanics and prepare the camera for exposure.

Now I have accomplished the necessary steps to get a negative with correctly exposed shadows. What about the bright parts? If we say that Zone II represents fine shadow detail, then Zone VIII on the opposite end of the scale stands for the fine details in the highlights. This six Zone span is the detail representing range of a photographic print (the maximum range is 0 to X of course). If now I read the highlights of the scene I am facing and they should fall on Zone VIII I am assured that normal development of the negative will yield a relatively easy to print detailed negative. Should the reading fall on Zone IX or X I can reduce development by one or two steps (contraction) or vice versa – if the highlights are