Zone System - who has an easy to follow - simple guideline to setting it up

[Alex Benjamin]

I don't think it was a coincidence that Minor White looked just like the wild-eyed professor in Back to the Future. He certainly made some compelling prints; but he probably would have anyway without all the extra philosophical baggage.

It wasn't philosophy as much as his own brand of mysticism.

But he was indeed a superlative photographer and printer. Whether you call it previsualisation or just plain visualisation, it certainly worked.

 

[DREW WILEY]

I was trying to keep my description on the conservative side. I could have called him a Neoplatonic Theurgist or something like that, dividing up the universe into discrete mystical Zones. I've heard some of his key students refer to Minor as a "kook". One famously said they just wanted him to shut up and start showing the pictures instead.

 

[MurrayMinchin]

Apparently, Minor lived in Ansel's house for several years.

Can't imagine two more different 'types' of photographers, with Minor's wild abstractions and Ansel's, "If I have any credo it may be this: If I choose to photograph a rock, I must present a rock..."

Despite their differences, they got along.

Proselytizing for or against the Zone System is annoying. Lot's of room in the pool for all kinds of approaches...none is better than another... the final prints have to stand and speak for themselves!

 

[DREW WILEY]

Murray - a good illusionist never shows their hand anyway. They can teach, but if the prints themselves betray too much of the intervening process, something has gotten too mechanical.

 

[BrianShaw]

LOL An even better illusionist never shows their prints, but let's you imagine how great they are.

 

[GregY]

I wonder how Rob Skeoch is doing ?

 

[Bill Burk]

@Paul Howell that’s pretty darn cool.

 

[john_s]

I always shoot at box speed and have never used the zone system.

Am I a philistine?

It's likely that your metering technique suits the sort of negatives you like. Even simple placement rules like "don't let the meter see the bright sky" make more difference that a few 1/3 of a stop.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

I got to the Minor White workshop by default. I was attending college, my school did not offer photography but did offer a minor in photojournalism as it offer journalism. For some reason that I never understood, my school, LaVern College,got a grant to send one student to a workshop. This the 60s so it was big deal, travel, lodging and food. I was selected to go as I was the only student who had a 4X5, a speed graphic. Minor White was not amused. As a person who was training to be a photojournalist the idea of the ZS was a mystery. We spent 2 days learning to see (visualize or previsualize) in black and white. I cant say that I was an enthusiast, my usual format was and is 35mm. Still I do find it useful when shooting 4X5. Minor White was asked what he thought the difference was between visualization and pre visualization. I don't think he gave a answer that I could understand. In his book The Zone System Manual he writes.

Previsualition refers to the learnable power to look a scene person, or situation and "see" at the same time on the back of the eyelib or "sense" deep in the mind or body the various ways photography can render the subject. Then out of the all the potential rendering select one to photograph. Such selection makes up a large share of the photographer's creativity.

I have always used visualization.

So when I move around to get the right angle and compose my shot before shooting, isn't that visualization (or previsualization a la White)? So who doens;t do that?

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

I don't think it was a coincidence that Minor White looked just like the wild-eyed professor in Back to the Future. He certainly made some compelling prints; but he probably would have anyway without all the extra philosophical baggage.

Didn't they grow magic mushrooms where he lived?

 

[Sirius Glass]

It's likely that your metering technique suits the sort of negatives you like. Even simple placement rules like "don't let the meter see the bright sky" make more difference that a few 1/3 of a stop.

I have often posted to keep the sky out of the field of view of the light meter. That is a version of metering the subject.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Alan - In this context you need to distinguish between things like perspective and composition from the kind of mystical "previsualization" Minor White had in mind, or in his mind at least. There certainly is a lot of Gestalt to his prints - or just call them "heavvvy, Dude" if that explains it. ... not as if you need to worry about any of that in your own workflow. The Zone System can be just a practical tool without all the voodoo psychology. One can adopt whatever is useful to them personally, and ignore the rest, if that is what works. I don't worry about any of it.

 

[Paul Howell]

So when I move around to get the right angle and compose my shot before shooting, isn't that visualization (or previsualization a la White)? So who doens;t do that?

I don't think so, it is your viewfinder, it what you will see in the final image not what you think you will see. And I think visualization is limited to the intended tones or zones of a black and white image. Well, maybe not, we were taught to use a cutout of a 4X5 with 150mm lens to compose a shot, but in the end we used the ground glass to compose, so back to just tones or zones.

 

[BrianShaw]

So when I move around to get the right angle and compose my shot before shooting, isn't that visualization (or previsualization a la White)? So who doens;t do that?

That is composition, which is only a part of Zone System visualization.

This is a rather easy read and a decent overview. Specifically see the definition of Zone System and the short discussion of principles of visualization:

Zone System - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[MattKing]

So when I move around to get the right angle and compose my shot before shooting, isn't that visualization (or previsualization a la White)? So who doens;t do that?

In real life, the scene looked like this, but not identical to this - the drama was there, but muted:

However, while I stood there on the foot bridge looking at the water, the trees, the brightly lit clouds, the dark foreboding clouds, the mountains in the background, the reflections in the foreground, and in particular the hydro poles and lines, I visualized the print I could make, if I exposed the (35mm) film carefully, and printed it interestingly.
The Zone System is all about being able to, in your mind and with the photographic tools at your disposal, envision what the final results can end up to be if you make some of the photographic choices available to you - sort of like having Photoshop adjustment sliders in your head, and a viewing screen in your mind (to stretch an analogy a bit).
The System part is merely the part that attempts to make the result predictable, when you choose certain exposure, film development and eventually printing options.
FWIW, once I have a darkroom work print I like, I go another step down the visualization road - I envision how toning might enhance the result. Sometimes that mandates a slight change in the printing as well. In the case of this image, different toning choices and different printing choices result in subtly different results - which as much as possible you want to be able to visualize before you make the print. Here (from Postcard Exchange number 36) is the result of some of those changes:

 

[Doremus Scudder]

So when I move around to get the right angle and compose my shot before shooting, isn't that visualization (or previsualization a la White)? So who doesn't do that?

Photography has possibilities and limitations. Black-and-white photography has the abstraction afforded by the rendering of colors as shades of gray plus the possibility to change the relationships around using filters. Then there are development controls to affect contrast, etc., etc.

I can expose for inky black shadows, make the blue sky black with a filter and ramp up the contrast so that clouds pop out and mid-tone textures take on an unreal micro-contrast.

I can expose the same scene for luminous shadows with lots of detail, use a Wratten #44 filter for an orthochromatic rendering to get light skies and soft clouds along with dark reds.

There are lots of other things I can do with the same scene when exposing, if I know my craft and my medium well. Then there are all the things you can do in the darkroom when printing...

Minor White's "previsualization" is a mental exercise of going through all the possibilities mentally and selecting what suits the subject and how you wish to render it emotionally. It contains AA's "visualization," which seems to me to be more limited to knowing how luminance values in the scene will be rendered and making sure a usable negative is obtained along with a bit of knowing what filter effects will do to a scene, how shadow placement renders shadows differently, etc. Minor White took the whole rendering of tones into the realm of psychological expression and mysticism; kind of like Scriabin did with harmonies.

White was a black-and-white photographer. The abstraction and controls available in that medium are greater than those in color photography, which is maybe why there's not so much woo-woo about color.

Best,

Doremus

 

[Milpool]

In the end the Zone System is just trying to give the film sufficient exposure and increasing/decreasing negative contrast. It’s a perfectly fine way of doing things (barring the extremes which can be problematic), but has been blown way out of proportion. As long as a negative was given enough exposure, the rest is under the enlarger (or in a software editor). There’s no magic in exposing and developing negatives.

Alan - In this context you need to distinguish between things like perspective and composition from the kind of mystical "previsualization" Minor White had in mind, or in his mind at least. There certainly is a lot of Gestalt to his prints - or just call them "heavvvy, Dude" if that explains it. ... not as if you need to worry about any of that in your own workflow. The Zone System can be just a practical tool without all the voodoo psychology. One can adopt whatever is useful to them personally, and ignore the rest, if that is what works. I don't worry about any of it.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Doremus - AA did try to apply his version of the ZS to color photography too; but it was a misfit. With color, you're working center out in terms of proper hue placement, whereas in black and white you're selecting a tonal range between personally defined extremes. AA's limited amount color work wasn't shabby; but it wasn't all that special either. Finely controlling the interaction of hues is a whole different ballgame than working with grayscale tonality. I enjoy doing both, although an awful lot of color I see is more about being superficially "colorful" rather than anything sensitively balanced.

When it comes to Minor White attaching mystical connotations to different shades of gray, that's what Kandinsky and Karl Gerstner did to different discrete colors. Each had their own diecast manifesto mentality about such things, which ironically varies with different background cultures anyway.

 

[Milpool]

Kind of off topic but I’ve always enjoyed the Ansel Adams in Color book.

Doremus - AA did try to apply his version of the ZS to color photography too; but it was a misfit. With color, you're working center out in terms of proper hue placement, whereas in black and white you're selecting a tonal range between personally defined extremes. AA's limited amount color work wasn't shabby; but it wasn't all that special either. Finely controlling the interaction of hues is a whole different ballgame than working with grayscale tonality. I enjoy doing both, although an awful lot of color I see is more about being superficially "colorful" rather than anything sensitively balanced.

When it comes to Minor White attaching mystical connotations to different shades of gray, that's what Kandinsky and Karl Gerstner did to different discrete colors. Each had their own diecast manifesto mentality about such things, which ironically varies with different background cultures anyway.

 

[cliveh]

Since AA did not have access to MG paper and split grade printing, can we assume that much better prints can now be achieved?

 

[BrianShaw]

Since AA did not have access to MG paper and split grade printing, can we assume that much better prints can now be achieved?

Much better?; by who? AA most likely would have converted to digital phitography decades ago...

 

[Alex Benjamin]

Minor White took the whole rendering of tones into the realm of psychological expression and mysticism; kind of like Scriabin did with harmonies.

Brilliantly put. I don't know why I never saw the correspondence. It's perfect.

 

[Alex Benjamin]

Since AA did not have access to MG paper and split grade printing, can we assume that much better prints can now be achieved?

I've posted this earlier in the thread, but I'll repeat it (sorry):

Multi-contrast paper and the split grade printing technique are briefly mentioned in Ansel Adams' The Print : "...we can also use variable-contrast effects in individual print areas. For example, the No. 2 contrast filter may be appropriate for the overall values of an image, but some low values may require additional contrast, or some high values may need greater separation. We can then make the main exposure using one filter, and use a different filter for burning-in."

This is accompanied by an example of the technique being used on a print.

Ilford's Ilfospeed multicontrast paper was available since the 70s, and I believe there was a Kodak MG paper out around the same time. Adams did have access to MG paper and graded filters, but they did appear between 5 or 8 years before his death, at a time when he was much less active as a photographer. It is not known if he tried re-printing some of his photographs using the technique, even if just for himself.

 

[DREW WILEY]

If digital photography had been around, AA wouldn't even exist, as an icon at least. Let's see ... no hand-led mule carrying weighty slow contemplative camera gear resulting in those meditative poetic images, no intersection with the rise of the Natl Parks movement, no Stetson cowboy hat - instead, some trail runner in REI jogging shoes with a little GoPro device clamped to his golf cap visor doing the same silly stuff as millions of others, and prematurely dying at 22 because he tripped over a log and cracked his head while staring at the latest mirrorless lens prices on his smartphone. How about having a little respect for history, Brian?

The part I never could get was the smelly felt Stetson hat. Those things look like deer fur and attract mosquitoes and biting flies. But yeah, I worked one summer for a pack station doing the cowboy thing, and there was nothing optional about wearing a Stetson.

 

[Alex Benjamin]

Just dawned on me how much asking a question about the Zone System here is a lot like John Belushi yelling "Food fight!" in Animal House: gets real messy real quick but in its own way hilarious nonetheless .