You’ve probably heard of the Zone System. And chances are, you think of it as some complicated film thing that Ansel Adams invented that requires a whole bunch of math, and is only useful for film. Well, you’re partly right. It was invented by Ansel Adams with film in mind. But it only requires a little bit of math, and absolutely didn’t become obsolete in the face of the digital revolution. I use the Zone System to one extent or another just about every time I shoot, whether it’s my 4x5 or my DSLR.
To be honest, there are already a lot of great resources about the Zone System online and elsewhere, so I hesitated to write an article trying to cover it. It’s a big topic, which I think partly explains why so many people feel intimidated by it. Ansel Adams himself wrote a three book series that you may have heard of—The Camera, The Negative, and The Print are great reads, and if you want to know a lot about the Zone System, The Negative is hard to beat as a source. Bruce Barnbaum goes into detail on it on it in The Art of Photography. And of course, Googling “the Zone System” will find you untold numbers of articles, critiques, and forum arguments about it.
My purpose for today’s post is simply to go through it in terms that aren’t overly technical, and show you how you can apply it in your photography regardless of what kind of camera you’re using. I’ll do my best to find the balance between boring technicalities, and oversimplification.
At its core, the Zone System is just a method of effectively getting from Point A: “I’m standing at a scene I want to photograph” to Point B: “I’m looking at a finished print of that scene, and it’s exactly what I wanted it to look like.” Of course, Ansel Adams and Fred Archer designed it with black and white film and traditional darkroom printing in mind, but you can use the same ideas and concepts in a digital workflow. Yes, even if you’re not going to print your work (although you really should print your work).
Before we get into the “how to” section of the article, I want to give you a brief primer on an important underlying concept: what a “Zone” is. A Zone is nothing more than a way to say how bright something is in your photo. Zones are most commonly denoted with Roman numerals. While dividing a photo into Zones of brightness is possible in color photography, it’s a little easier to visualize for the purposes of learning if we think in terms of black & white photography. You might remember from the histogram post that a histogram shows all levels of brightness between 0 (black) and 255 (white). In the Zone System, any given print has tones that can be divided into a more manageable eleven Zones:
Zone 0 is pure black - as dark as the paper or screen can go.
Zone I is a gray so dark it’s nearly black without any detail (deep shadows)
Zone II is very dark gray with a hint of detail or texture (dark shadowy areas in a landscape)
Zone III is dark, but containing texture (dark rocks, burnt wood)
Zone IV is medium dark with lots of detail (darker foliage)
Zone V is middle gray, exactly halfway between pure black and pure white (still water like a lake, gray rocks)
Zone VI is a lighter gray (most Caucasian skin tones)
Zone VII is a very light gray (very fair skin tones, whitewater like a waterfall)
Zone VIII is coming up against white, with a hint of texture (clean snow under soft light, bright clouds)
Zone IX is nearly pure white (glaring snow)
Zone X is absolute pure white - totally unexposed paper or the brightest white value a pixel can be on a screen.
For you visual learners out there, here’s a photo I took that is labeled with areas that have landed in most of these Zones.
Note that nothing important is darker than Zone II in this photo, and the very brightest areas of the photo are only in Zone VIII. This was on purpose - I made sure to get these tones where I wanted them while printing.
It’s important to note that these Zones represent different brightness levels on your finished product, whether that’s a physical print or a photo displayed on a screen. Real life has a much broader range of brightnesses than any print or screen, and your eyes can see details in shadows or highlights of a scene that your camera may not be able to capture all at once. That’s kind of what makes the the Zone System is useful—figuring out how to fit the huge range of brightnesses you find in the real world into the limited tonal space you have to work with in a print, so it looks how you envisioned it.
Without further ado, here’s a simplified tutorial for applying the Zone System in your photography:
Step 1: See the scene you want to photograph, and visualize how you want the final print to look.
Is there something in the scene you want to feature heavily in the composition? Where do you want a lot of contrast and where don’t you? How bright should the sky be? What parts of the scene have important texture that you need to make sure you preserve? While you don’t have to actually picture in your mind’s eye every little detail about how the finished photo should look, going through some of these types of questions before you start setting up your camera is really important, as it gives you an idea to work toward throughout the entire process. Without it, you’re just clicking on autopilot and hoping you find something worth keeping on your film or memory card later. If you know what you’re trying to achieve, you’ll have a target to guide decisions about focal length, framing, focus, depth of field, exposure, etc.
For example, in the waterfall photo above, I knew I wanted the rocks to generally look dark and strong to anchor the composition, but still have detail. That meant I would want the rock to be in the neighborhood of Zone III or Zone IV in the final photo. I also knew I wanted the waterfall to contrast strongly and look much brighter than the surrounding rocks, and while I didn’t want it to be featureless, I was okay letting some of it lose some detail. That meant I would want to get the water into Zones VII and VIII for the final print. Knowing how I wanted it to look before I clicked the shutter helped me make decisions about exposure, development, and later, printing. If I had shot this scene digitally, knowing how I wanted it to look when it was done would have helped me decide on exposure, bracketing, and editing.
This is arguably the most important part of the Zone System (and also the part with the least amount of math, as it happens). If you’re not interested in doing any of the other steps, or you have a workflow that’s doing the job for you, it’s still hugely valuable to take a minute to look at the scene and visualize how you want the finished photo to look.
Step 2: Find out the contrast range of the scene and figure out your exposure.
Once your camera is set up, your lens on, your framing settled and your camera focused and ready to expose, you need to figure out the contrast range of the scene so that you can get as much of it as you need recorded. This is true of film and digital.
This is a good time to tell you that when you’re metering and exposing a photo, there is exactly one stop of light in between each adjacent Zone. If you take a photo exposing a boulder at Zone IV, but you actually wanted to expose it at Zone V, you can simply take another photo with your ISO bumped up from 200 to 400, or your shutter speed cut from 1/100th to 1/50th. Exposing one stop brighter will bump the brightness on every part of your photo up one Zone.
When you pick an exposure, you’re usually picking one thing and “placing” it on a specific Zone. I tend to expose most rocks around Zone IV or V as in the previous example. But there’s nothing stopping me from choosing an exposure that sets that rock at Zone XXVII if I wanted to. The entire picture would come out pure white, of course, but I could do it. Thing is, once you have “placed” something on a Zone by deciding your exposure, everything else in the photo will “fall” on its own Zone. The sky is probably brighter than the rock. So if I expose the rock at Zone V, I have simultaneously exposed the sky at something like Zone VII, or VIII, maybe even brighter. The point here is that Zones are relative, and by choosing an exposure, we don’t get to control the differences in brightness between different parts of the scene.
In my article about histograms and bracketing, we talked about how a lot of scenes have way more contrast or dynamic range than a digital camera can capture in a single exposure. While our eventual goal is to fit the entire range of the scene into the space between Zone 0 and Zone X, it’s likely that you have parts of your scene that are much brighter than Zone X, and/or much darker than Zone I.
Most black and white films can capture detail quite a bit brighter than Zone VIII. I shoot a lot of Ilford HP5+, and it can record detail up to around Zone XV or even XVI. But I have to do some extra steps in developing and printing/scanning the film to get all of that detail to fit into the final image instead of just coming out pure white. With digital, if your scene exceeds the dynamic range your sensor can capture, you’ll want to bracket exposures. Slide films like Kodak Ektachrome can actually only contain around 7 Zones of contrast range, which is the main reason they’re so tricky to shoot with. Nature photographers shooting a lot of slide film often use tools like graduated neutral density filters to help tame the contrast range in a scene at the time of exposure, since their options for controlling contrast and recovering highlights after exposure are basically nonexistent.
If you’re shooting film, this is where you get out your light meter. The more precisely small area of a scene you can meter at a time, the better you’ll be able to pick out accurate readings. For that reason I use a handheld spot meter when I’m shooting film that can meter very small parts of the scene in front of me. Any part of the scene where I want to have detail or texture needs to be no brighter than Zone VIII and no darker than Zone II. I generally find the darkest part of the scene that I want to show detail in the final print (oftentimes a dark patch of mountain, or a spot of shade under a tree), and set my exposure so that “low point” lands on Zone III or sometimes Zone IV. Then I find the brightest part of the scene that I want to keep detail in (oftentimes the sky, a cloud, or some snow), and see how many stops brighter it is than the dark area I metered. If the brightest part of the scene where I want texture is 3-4 stops brighter than the darkest part of the scene where I want texture, I’m in luck. I can simply set my exposure to place the dark part on Zone III or IV, and the bright spot will automatically land on Zone VII or VIII. Everything fits into the zones where I want it to, and this negative can be developed normally and printed or scanned easily.
But what if the bright area is like 8 stops brighter than the dark area? That happens all the time on a sunny day. If I expose the dark area at Zone IV, then the bright area will land on Zone XII, which is beyond pure white with no detail. I have two options here. If I’m shooting black & white film, I can make a note to change the development on this film to compensate for having too much contrast range in it to fit nicely onto a print. This is where a lot of the intimidating math in the Zone System takes place, so if you’re shooting digital, you just dodged that bullet. Honestly it’s not that bad, but it’s more detail than I want to get into in this article, which is already getting long. My other option here is just to “burn in” during the printing process or scan the negative multiple times at different brightness levels to make sure I’m pulling detail out of all the Zones that were exposed into the film.
With digital, you are welcome to go through and meter different parts of your scene. It’s not a bad habit, and knowing how to quickly judge optimal exposure is a valuable skill to develop. But it’s honestly way easier and faster to just take a photo with your best educated guess for exposure, look at the histogram, and see how you did. If you’re not seeing blown out highlights or blocked up shadows on the histogram, then your exposure is probably workable. I tend to “expose to the right,” which is to say that I usually go with the brightest exposure I can get away with before I start seeing pure white highlights where I’ve lost detail. It’s much easier to take something brighter than I want and darken it down in post processing than it is to take something too dark and brighten it up, at least with my digital cameras.
For something like portraits, the Zone System is nice because I can simply meter the subject’s face, which is almost invariably the most important part of the photo. If the subject is Caucasian, I set the exposure so that those skin tones land on Zone VI or Zone VII. The rest of the scene can fall where it may, and I’m usually okay with it, even if I have some pure white or pure black somewhere in the background.
If I can’t fit the whole contrast range into a single exposure, I’ll bracket. Simple as that. There’s a more detailed discussion of bracketing and reading histograms here.
Step 3: Expose your photo, then develop.
For film, there’s some experimentation and math you can do to to figure out how to change the amount of time your film spends in the developing chemicals, in order to grow or shrink the brightness and contrast range on the film compared to what was recorded at the time of exposure. Initial calibration takes some work, but I find great satisfaction in calibrating this and seeing negatives come out of the developing tank looking exactly how I anticipated.
For digital, “developing” your photo is as simple as tossing the RAW into your editor of choice and going to work with adjustments and masks. Obviously digital gives you a lot more convenience and far less risk of permanently screwing something up by changing brightness and contrast. Analog processes don’t have an “undo” button, and the tone “controls” for chemically processing film take a lot more time to master than Lightroom sliders. It’s such a great payoff though to wrangle a difficult scene with high contrast and tame it enough to get a perfect print without ever touching a computer.
Regardless of your method or workflow, the point here is to get the tones where you imagined them back in step one. Were you picturing a dramatic waterfall scene with bold, dark, craggy rocks, and brightly contrasting whitewater? I was. I managed to get the job done with careful development and printing. Should be pretty easy to get everything to land on the Zone you intended with exposure, contrast, and dodge/burn tools in Lightroom, Photoshop, or any other software.
Step 4: Print your photo!
If you’re printing in the darkroom from a negative, you have another chance here to exert some influence on your brightness (by varying exposure with the enlarger), contrast (by selecting different contrast filters), and local brightness areas via dodging and burning, to really hone the tones in your final print to exactly where you want them. Even more advanced techniques like split-tone printing, masking, pre-flashing, bleaching, and chemical toning can offer additional ways to control the appearance of the final print. This can be a lifesaver if you bungled something in your exposure or development. Of course, that never happens to a consummate professional such as myself. And I certainly haven’t had to resort to so-called “darkroom heroics” to end up with a good analog print.
In a digital workflow, you’ve already handled all of that in the editing software before you print.
Either way, I’m of the opinion that no photograph is ever fully realized until it’s off the hard drive and onto paper, canvas, metal, acrylic, or some other physical medium that you can hold in your hands and hang on your wall. Every time you see that photograph, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you created it in your mind before you ever got your camera out of the bag, and then used the photographic tools available to you to bring that creation to life physically as well.
Still fuzzy on something? Curious about the real nuts and bolts of the Zone System as applied to analog processes? Hit me up in the comments and I’ll see what I can do to help.