Exactly, that is why the Zone System is not needed. One needs to learn to print the many tones in film on to fewer tones on paper.
At the risk of sounding flippant (which I do from time-to-time
), I was under the impression that this was precisely why the Zone System was invented. Yes, with modern VC papers, exact tailoring of the negative to a specific paper grade isn't needed so much, but there are still scenes that print a whole lot better on whatever paper grade if we realize that expanded or reduced development is needed to get the many tones present onto the paper...
If people want to use it as a "visualization" tool (?), fine. But they should also know the controls are quite limited in the context of print quality. Printing is where the control is at.
Michael,
You seem to "poo-poo" the idea of visualization here, and I don't really understand why. Here are a few things I consider "visualization" and why I think they are important. I'd love to have your comments:
1. Filter use. Every time I use a filter, it's because I've looked at the scene and decided I'd like to manipulate it in a particular way. I consider this using visualization to achieve desired results. Without an idea of what a filter does, I would have no reason to choose it, or one over the other. (AA's "epiphany" visualization was with a filter too IIRC (Half Dome).)
2. Certainly, just metering extremes and squeezing them onto the film in a pre-determined way is mostly mechanical, but it is still a visualization somewhat in that one realizes that the shadows won't go featureless or the highlights won't be difficult to print. However, when I decide to place a shadow value in Zone 0 because I want no detail there, or I decide to develop N+1 and let a sky go to Zone XII because I want it white and really want the other elements in the scene to be separated more, then I'm really visualizing, as far as I understand the term. It's a result I couldn't get with "normal" metering and processing.
3. When I intentionally over-expose a long-toe film to get shadows up into the straight-line portion of the curve, I'm visualizing a result that I wouldn't be able to get with "normal" exposure. Similarly, when I decide to use an ND filter and reciprocity failure to expand separation in the low values of a scene, I'm visualizing a "non-normal" result.
4. When I develop N+1 or more for a scene that has a normal luminance range, knowing full well that I'll be spending a lot of time dodging and burning (with split filtration on VC paper if that's the requirement), I've again departed from "normal" and used my visualization of what result I want to alter my development scheme.
For all of the above, my spot meter is the tool that tells me (as accurately as it can) what the reality of the scene is. Without this information and the ability to picture in my mind's eye how that will look in a final print, I wouldn't be able to decide to accept a "normal" rendering of that or depart from it in any of a number of ways. While I agree that printing provides the majority of controls, controls at the exposure and development stage are not any less powerful. However, in order to utilize these latter, we must be able to know what effect they are going to have and what possibilities they will enable and exclude; i.e., we must be able to visualize the possibilities in order to choose what to do with the negative in terms of exposure and development if we want to do anything else than just expose and develop "correctly." Even this latter requires some figuring out of what "correct" is.
Best,
Doremus