You now know that if you are using a calibrated system and

• meter on a particular part of the subject
• expose at the recommended meter reading for that subject area
• over-or-under-expose by up to 5 F-stops
• develop and print the film normally

As you over-expose the subject, you move the subject placement toward white.
As you under-expose the subject, you move the subject placement toward black.

If you neither over-expose nor under-expose the subject, but instead use exact exposure indicated by the meter, it is said that you place the subject on Zone V.

Calculate the amount of movement by the number of F-stops you varied from the indicated meter reading. Then starting in the middle of the grayscale, at Zone V, each F-stop of over-exposure moves you one Zone toward white (from Zone V). Similarly each F-stop of under-exposure moves you one Zone toward black (from Zone V).

Not to worry if this is confusing. It is harder to explain than to understand. If the explanation doesn't make sense to you, blame it on my highly suspect skills for verbalizing things. Go to the emulator and play with modifying the exposure. The thing will come to you after a while. Loading 'Helpfile 2' in the top frame may make the second level of controls available through the emulator make more sense. At the bottom of that file are links to two tables with more examples.

More Implications

You can now see that by carefully metering and exposing on any subject area, that you can cause that subject area to be reproduced wherever you want it on the grayscale. This is something to get excited about because of the nuance of expression it allows you. There are subtleties involved. Practice imagining that you are showing a finished print of the current subject of your camera to someone. Ask yourself what visual relationships of that subject are currently interesting enough to make you photograph it.

There are many elements that make up a successful photograph; one of those elements is the relationship of lights and darks in the subject. You certainly think it is your responsibility to manage the composition of the subject - to make the viewer become interested in the picture. You probably think it your responsibility to manage to find a 'decisive moment' to actually take the photograph; you easily come to the conclusion that are other things which interest you sufficiently to manage their reproduction. I am suggesting that the relationships that exist between the lights, the darks and the middle gray tones of your photograph are not only worth managing but usually play a role in the success or lack thereof of most photographs.

By way of an example, I photographed a docked shrimp boat in the middle of the night using only existing light. The boat was docked next to a building with white clapboard and a light over the entrance. If it were daytime, the clapboard might have looked best reproduced as, maybe, Zone 8 or 9. But at night that kind of placement would have been too close to pure white to make the bare lightbulb glare forth in beacon-like fashion. I ultimately placed the clapboard around Zone 7. This may seem like an unnecessary decision but it isn't.

Have you ever watched a live television event where darkness fell during the event. The television camera continued reproducing the event as though lit by broad daylight. You can't even tell that the event is taking place in near total darkness. The announcer has to tell you. All of this is fine for television. We want to see the tv event as it unfolds. But if want you to sense the quality of light at that event, you would say that the television reproduction was a poor one.

What the television camera might do automatically, you can have control over in your work. The scene in our example could have been reproduced to resemble daylight illumination -- even using the existing light of night without additional illumination. Instead, I wanted the sense that it was night with fully detailed shadow areas but also a medium-strong glare from the light over the door. A light can hardly glare if it is surrounded by equally light areas. So by placing the white wall at just the right place on the grayscale, the light above it was able to glare just perfectly.

In actuality, there were more calculations involved than are mentioned here but the final effect has the clapboard wall placed close to Zone 7 and the lightbulb ended up on Zone 10 -- pure white. The combination of print values is the thing that makes the photograph is mood and power.

Unhelpful Use

There are unhelpful ways to apply the knowledge you have learned from the first chapters. That is, unhelpful from the point of view of developing the set of tools I want to offer you.

For example, as tempting as it is, it is not helpful to live by a set of rules about using a gray card to establish your meter readings. Likewise, it is not helpful to develop a set of rules about where certain subjects should be placed on the grayscale; it is not helpful to develop a set of rules about kinds of development techniques that are forbidden. It is not helpful to develop a set of rules that dictates kinds of subjects you should never photograph.

Below is list of unhelpful axioms

• snow should be on Zone 8 1/2
• caucasian skin should be on zone 6
• never use Minus development
• never photograph backlighted subjects

These unhelpful rules above can be tempting, and they might be helpful for some purposes, but those ideas and others like them antagonize the nurturing of the deepest freedoms accorded you by the principles of this study.