Awoiska van der Molen (born 1972) is a Dutch photographer, living in Amsterdam. Between 2000 and 2003, van der Molen made portraits of charismatic women she met on the streets of Manhattan, later switching to people judged by different criteria. After that she turned to photographing anonymous buildings at the edge of the city. Since 2009, she has concentrated on the natural world, travelling alone to remote places in order to make the work. She makes black and white prints in her own darkroom.
Photography exists by the virtue of light, but the landscapes in Awoiska van der Molens photographs loom out of the darkness. Her monochrome photographic works arise out of a desire to penetrate deeply into the core of the isolated world in which she photographs. Van der Molen is known for her monochrome landscapes. She stands out as someone who remains rooted in the riches of analogue photography and printing; expressing these roots in an extreme manner by creating monumental pieces that combine intentionality in choice of subject and photographic craftsmanship.
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She has produced three books of black and white landscape photographs, made in remote places:
Sequester (2014) “photographed throughout the whole of Europe” including the volcanic Canary Islands,contains monochromatic “landscapes, at times abstractly rendered to the point of dissolving into abstractions [. . . ] often obliterating all sense of the physical scale that was in front of the camera, many of them using very narrow ranges of tonality, from the blackest black to maybe a dark grey”.
Photography exists by the virtue of light, but the landscapes in Awoiska van der Molen’s photographs loom out of the darkness. Her monochrome photographic works arise out of a desire to penetrate deeply into the core of the isolated world in which she photographs. Awoiska van der Molen is known for her monochrome landscapes. She stands out as someone who remains rooted in the riches of analogue photography and printing. She plays out these roots in an extreme manner by creating monumental pieces that combine intentionality in choice of subject and photographic craftsmanship.
(2017) contains photographs of desolate landscapes and trees.
“Spending long periods of time in solitude in remote landscapes, Awoiska van der Molen slowly uncovers the identity of the place, allowing it to impress upon her its specific emotional and physical qualities. Using her personal experience within the landscape for her creative process, she instinctively searches for a state of being in which the boundary between herself and her surroundings blur”.
Anna Dannemann, The Photographers’ Gallery | Deutsche Borse Photography Foundation Prize 2017.
The Living Mountain
(2020) is “a book about land, solitude and the planet we inhabit.”
‘Regardless of how personal the starting point of my work may be, in the end I hope my images touch the strings of a universal knowledge, something lodged in our bodies, our guts, an intuition that reminds us of where we came from ages ago. A memory of our core existence, our bedrock, unyielding certainty in a very precarious world’.
Every digital image consists of a fundamental small-scale descriptor: THE PIXEL, invented by combining the words “PICture ELement.” Each pixel contains a series of numbers which describe its color or intensity. The precision to which a pixel can specify color is called its bit or color depth. The more pixels your image contains, the more detail it has the ability to describe (although more pixels alone don’t necessarily result in more detail; more on this later).
PRINT SIZE: PIXELS PER INCH vs. DOTS PER INCH
Since a pixel is just a unit of information, it is useless for describing real-world prints — unless you also specify their size. The terms pixels per inch (PPI) and dots per inch (DPI) were both introduced to relate this theoretical pixel unit to real-world visual resolution. These terms are often inaccurately interchanged — misleading the user about a device’s maximum print resolution (particularly with inkjet printers).
“Pixels per inch” (PPI) is the more straightforward of the two terms. It describes just that: how many pixels an image contains per inch of distance (horizontally or vertically). PPI is also universal because it describes resolution in a way that doesn’t vary from device to device.
“Dots per inch” (DPI) may seem deceptively simple at first, but the complication arises because multiple dots are often needed to create a single pixel — and this varies from device to device. In other words, a given DPI does not always lead to the same resolution. Using multiple dots to create each pixel is a process called “dithering.”
Printers use dithering to create the appearance of more colors than they actually have. However, this trick comes at the expense of resolution, since dithering requires each pixel to be created from an even smaller pattern of dots. As a result, images will require more DPI than PPI in order to depict the same level of detail.
In the above example, note how the dithered version is able to create the appearance of 128 pixel colors — even though it has far fewer dot colors (only 24). However, this result is only possible because each dot in the dithered image is much smaller than the pixels.
The standard for prints done in a photo lab is about 300 PPI, but inkjet printers require several times this number of DPI (depending on the number of ink colors) for photographic quality. The required resolution also depends on the application; magazine and newspaper prints can get away with much less than 300 PPI.
However, the more you try to enlarge a given image, the lower its PPI will become…
MEGAPIXELS AND MAXIMUM PRINT SIZE
A “megapixel” is simply a million pixels. If you require a certain resolution of detail (PPI), then there is a maximum print size you can achieve for a given number of megapixels. The following chart gives the maximum print sizes for several common camera megapixels.
# of Megapixels
Maximum 3:2 Print Size
at 300 PPI:
at 200 PPI:
2
5.8″ x 3.8″
8.7″ x 5.8″
3
7.1″ x 4.7″
10.6″ x 7.1″
4
8.2″ x 5.4″
12.2″ x 8.2″
5
9.1″ x 6.1″
13.7″ x 9.1″
6
10.0″ x 6.7″
15.0″ x 10.0″
8
11.5″ x 7.7″
17.3″ x 11.5″
12
14.1″ x 9.4″
21.2″ x 14.1″
16
16.3″ x 10.9″
24.5″ x 16.3″
22
19.1″ x 12.8″
28.7″ x 19.1″
Note how a 2 megapixel camera cannot even make a standard 4×6 inch print at 300 PPI, whereas it requires a whopping 16 megapixels to make a 16×10 inch photo. This may be discouraging, but do not despair! Many will be happy with the sharpness provided by 200 PPI, although an even lower PPI may suffice if the viewing distance is large (see “Digital Photo Enlargement“). For example, most wall posters are often printed at less than 200 PPI, since it’s assumed that you won’t be inspecting them from 6 inches away.
CAMERA & IMAGE ASPECT RATIO
The print size calculations above assumed that the camera’s aspect ratio, or ratio of longest to shortest dimension, is the standard 3:2 used for 35 mm cameras. In fact, most compact cameras, monitors and TV screens have a 4:3 aspect ratio, while most digital SLR cameras are 3:2. Many other types exist though: some high end film equipment even use a 1:1 square image, and DVD movies are an elongated 16:9 ratio.
This means that if your camera uses a 4:3 aspect ratio, but you need a 4 x 6 inch (3:2) print, then some of your megapixels will be wasted (11%). This should be considered if your camera has a different ratio than the desired print dimensions.
Pixels themselves can also have their own aspect ratio, although this is less common. Certain video standards and earlier Nikon cameras have pixels with skewed dimensions.
SENSOR SIZE: NOT ALL PIXELS ARE CREATED EQUAL
Even if two cameras have the same number of pixels, it does not necessarily mean that the size of their pixels are also equal. The main distinguishing factor between a more expensive digital SLR and a compact camera is that the former has a much greater digital sensor area. This means that if both an SLR and a compact camera have the same number of pixels, the size of each pixel in the SLR camera will be much larger.
Compact Camera Sensor SLR Camera Sensor
Why does one care about how big the pixels are? A larger pixel has more light-gathering area, which means the light signal is stronger over a given interval of time.
This usually results in an improved signal to noise ratio (SNR), which createsa smoother and more detailed image. Furthermore, the dynamic range of the images (range of light to dark which the camera can capture without becoming either black or clipping highlights) also increases with larger pixels. This is because each pixel well can contain more photons before it fills up and becomes completely white.
The diagram below illustrates the relative size of several standard sensor sizes on the market today. Most digital SLR’s have either a 1.5X or 1.6X crop factor (compared to 35 mm film), although some high-end models actually have a digital sensor which has the same area as 35 mm. Sensor size labels given in inches do not reflect the actual diagonal size, but instead reflect the approximate diameter of the “imaging circle” (not fully utilized). Nevertheless, this number is in the specifications of most compact cameras.
Why not just use the largest sensor possible? The main disadvantage of having a larger sensor is that they are much more expensive, so they are not always beneficial.
Does all this mean it is bad to squeeze more pixels into the same sensor area? This will usually produce more noise, but only when viewed at 100% on your computer monitor. In an actual print, the higher megapixel model’s noise will be much more finely spaced — even though it appears noisier on screen (see “Image Noise: Frequency and Magnitude“). This advantage usually offsets any increase in noise when going to a larger megapixel model (with a few exceptions).
NOTE: To be completed. I want to take a practical course on digital printing with the Camera Club and study this in depth.
If commercial print companies are used see image guidelines for each lab. Images need to be either JPEG or TIFF), with whatever colour profile is required by the printer (usually Adobe 1998 RGB or sRGB) at the specified resolution (usually 300 dpi) and at the exact dimensions required.
The Task
It’s not a requirement to submit prints for formal assessment, so you may choose to submit your work on the self-directed project in a different format, such as a book or a multi-media piece. However for the purposes of this exercise please imagine that you’re going to submit prints. 1. Search the internet for different companies offering inkjet and C-type printing. Compile three quotes for getting your work professionally printed, with a variety of different options such as C-type or inkjet, for portfolio review. (The pictures don’t need to be framed or mounted.) Prices will be available on the companies’ websites. This kind of information is useful to inform your project proposal. 2. Imagine you will order from one of these companies. Prepare one image file exactly as specified by the printers. Please note that you don’t actually need to have your work printed professionally in order to complete this exercise. 3. Write a brief entry in your learning log, reflecting on whether or not you feel that an inkjet can be treated as a ‘photograph’.
Different labs providing C-type printing use different machines and different brands of papers that will produce subtly different results and varying levels of quality. Some companies often offer postal services, such as sending test strips for you to assess, so you can instruct their technicians to make any adjustments to the exposure or colour balance before making the final print. They will then store the adjusted file for any future editions.
Inkjet printers use an array of different colours and tones of ink that are applied onto specially coated paper. Inkjet prints can be produced on inexpensive domestic printers to make prints up to A4 size, A3+ printers can be bought from eg Canon and Epson for slightly more. Costly ‘large format’ printers that can produce prints up to 1.6 metres wide and potentially many metres long (as long as the roll of paper that the printer can accommodate).
Inkjet prints have had a negative reputation compared to traditional C-type prints for two main reasons. Firstly, cheap inkjet prints are more prone to fading by exposure to daylight – but some manufacturers now claim that their products can last at least as long (around 40 years). Secondly, technically they are not ‘photographic’ [ie light-writing] prints but prints of photographic images. This means many serious collectors may not buy inkjet prints.
As well as making slightly larger sized prints, inkjet prints can offer greater black and white contrast and more vivid colour saturation. They also allow for printing on a wider range of paper types.
Many established photographers make and sell archival quality inkjet prints (calling them giclee, Iris or archival pigment prints) printed on fine art papers.
See:
Mari Mahr website has monochrome archival pigment prints alongside more traditional black and white photographic prints.
Most cheap inkjet printers can make useful ‘work prints’, soft proofs, and important learning log material (if you’re keeping a physical log). Investing in a high-end inkjet printer is only worthwhile if you intend to make quite a lot of prints regularly and put significant time into learning how to get the best performance from it. Ink cartridges are expensive, particularly quality professional inks, and if the photographic printer is not used frequently (i.e. weekly), the print heads can become clogged, leaving unsightly ‘banding’ on the image. Regular cleaning can prevent this, although it does waste ink. Some printers can be modified to accept what is known as a ‘continuous ink feed’ instead of cartridges, which will reduce ink costs considerably.
Papers vary in surface (i.e. gloss, semigloss/ lustre, matt), rag content, colour and texture. Different paper stocks vary in how they respond to the printer’s ink, and will absorb ink in different quantities. Different printer profiles need to be set in the printing software for different types of paper to avoid unwanted colour casts and get the right level of contrast.
Giclee, archival pigment or Iris prints
Giclée is the name given to inkjets by professional printers and artists, although this term is unregulated. The term ‘Giclée’, a neologism coined by French printmaker Jack Duganne, is derived from the French verb ‘gicler’, which literally translates as ‘to squirt’ or ‘to spray’ and describes the way that the printer nozzle applies the inks – or pigment inks – to the paper. Duganne chose the term as he was looking for a word which would not have the negative connotations then associated with the terms ‘inkjet’ which had happened due to fading occurring in early prints.
While the term ‘Giclée’ originally referred to fine art prints created on IRIS printers (large format colour inkjet printers which became prevalent in the 1980’s) the term ‘Giclée’ has since been used in a wider sense to describe any prints made using an inkjet process. These prints are also often known as ‘pigment prints’ because of the inks (which contains miniature particles of colour, or pigment, suspended in a neutral carrier liquid) that are laid down by a digital printer. We use both ‘Giclée print’ and ‘Pigment print’ to describe an archival grade inkjet print produced directly to fine art paper.
Anyone claiming to produce giclée prints should be using the best quality archival inks and equally high quality paper, with professional colour calibration of the print to the monitor.
For more video tutorials on Inkjet printing and up-to-date reviews of different printers see: See You Tube videos
The Landscape brings together for the first time a collection of McCullin’s landscape photography, primarily set against the stormy backdrop of Somerset, where he now resides. The imagery of his home county, ravaged by storms, projects the associations of a battlefield or the views of one intimate with scenes of war.
The book also features landscape images from throughout his career taken in Syria, Iraq, Indonesia and India.
If you look again at McCullin’s landscapes, you start to sense the figure who made the pictures, invisible behind the lens, stepping forward with nothing but his own shadow – in the marsh, against the snow, along the causeway, over the brow. By now, he is stripped of all superfluities. He is not a man in repose, who lingers lazily. He is striding into the wind, as always.
Mark Holborn ‘One Man Walking’ introduction The Landscape p9
John Gossage (born 1946) is an American photographer working from Washington DC. His artist’s books and other publications use his photographs to explore the interplay between landscapes, urban environments, and the unseen or overlooked aspects of the places that are part of our everyday lives. His work not only captures the aesthetic of these locations but also invites viewers to consider the deeper stories and histories embedded within them. His work is noted for under-recognised elements of the urban environment such as abandoned tracts of land, debris and garbage, and graffiti, and themes of surveillance, memory and the relationship between architecture and power.
“I am a humanist, like most of us are, I can’t really step back to see the beauty and order of all this; closeness brings chaos and dread in this case. We have done harm to the place we live, I’m told, but it seems to me that we have done the most harm to ourselves and our best-laid plans. The planet has a plan to fix this, if we don’t.”
Should Nature Change 2019
I have absolutely no idea what I am doing any more and am totally sure of it. And that’s how it works’
Life and work
Gossage was born in Staten Island, New York City in 1946 and at an early age became interested in photography, leaving school at 16 and taking private instruction from Lisette Model, Alexey Brodovitch and Bruce Davidson. He later moved to Washington, D.C. to study, and subsequently received a grant from the Washington Gallery of Modern Art which allowed him to remain in the city and refine his photographic technique. He has shown his photographs in solo and group exhibitions since 1963.
After a number of years with Nazraeli Press his usual publisher is now Loosestrife Editions and Steidl. He has taught at the University of Maryland, College Park and curated several photographic exhibitions.
John Gossage’s first monograph, The Pond (1985), has been republished to great acclaim.
His other notable books include Stadt Des Schwarz (1987); LAMF (1987); There and Gone (1997); The Things That Animals Care About (1998); Hey Fuckface (2000); Snake Eyes (2002); Berlin in the Time of the Wall (2004); Putting Back the Wall (2007); The Secrets of Real Estate (2008); and The Thirty-Two Inch Ruler/Map of Babylon (2010); The Code ( 2011); She Called Me by Name (2012); The Actor (2011); Who Do You Love (2014); Nothing (2014); and pomodoii a grappolo (2015).
For Vimeo limited access versions of most of these books see: Vimeo Photobookstore.
Gossage photographed a small, unnamed pond between Washington, D.C., and Queenstown, Maryland, between 1981 and 1985.
The title was intended to recall Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, but Gossage advocated a more all-embracing view of the landscape, exploring the less idealized spaces that border America’s cities and suburbs. Although many of the images in The Pond appear unruly or uncared for, Gossage found moments of grace and elegance in even the most mundane of places.
A few years after being photographed the pond had dried up.
The pond is a literary monologue, a narrative landscape book, character development — all of it. … It’s set in Queenstown, but a few of the shots were actually taken in Berlin. I won’t tell which ones. I wanted to speak metaphorically about nature and civilization, which I realized halfway through my project. It’s a work of documentary fiction. The sites are universally trivial. There are many ponds, and that one may not even be there anymore.
The book is different [from the exhibition] in that it’s a narrative. You start at page one and move your way through. I was surprised because I really liked the show once I saw it. It’s given me new things to think about — things I haven’t digested yet.
John Gossage interviewed in Katherine Boyle (2021)
the sense one gets from the kind and placement of the trash around Gossage’s pond is that it wasn’t necessary to put it there, and the effect of doing so could not have been completely unanticipated; a few of the culprits may have been only willfully ignorant, but most were surely worse – those of us (I think we all do it, with varying degrees of indirection) who disfigure the landscape as a way of striking at life in general.…
Though Gossage’s study of nature in America is believable because it includes evidence of man’s darkness of spirit, it is memorable because of the intense fondness he shows for the remains of the natural world. He pictures everything – the loveliness of gravel, of sticks, of scum gleaning the water… He doesn’t even hesitate to photograph what we admire already (which is riskier, it being harder to awaken us to what we think we know), abruptly pointing his camera straight up at circling birds, and, later, over to a songbird on a wire.
Gossage does not use his survey of wood around a lake to stress an indictment; the off-road landscape through which he leads us is a mixture of the natural one and our junk, but his focus is not so much on the grotesqueries of the collage as on the reassurances of nature’s simplicities.
It’s all about the ordinary now, the little things at the edge of your consciousness, the “signs” all around you.…
Everyone everywhere now has a small thing that has changed for them. The big things, those things that always happen to someone else, the other people, the ones on the news. The earthquakes, the floods, the fires, the disasters, are all still there in their grand scale. But it’s that the birds that used to come to your backyard are no longer there is what keeps you up at night.
What I have been photographing for [Should Nature Change] are moments when the normal slips, and the disorder starts. Subtle things that whisper to you that things have started to change and in all likelihood not for the best. Nature looks slightly different, it’s a bit warmer, there is a fire at the edge of town, a few of the people much younger than you have a different look in their eyes — remember the dinosaurs?
Black and white pictures of the country I come from and at this point in my life, work to understand. The Times They Are A-Changin when I was younger I thought that song was about something different.
As I stood admiring just before sunrise, the reed-tops bending under their beautiful crystal heads, rooks came flying from a wood near by, and a vast flock of peewits darkened the sky. As the yellow sun arose in frosty splendour mists began to rise on the river, and there followed a brief spell of magic beauty ere the thickening mists began to bury everything as they blew in fitful gusts from the river. in On English Lagoons (1893)
Do not put off doing a coveted picture until another year, for next year the scene will look very different. You will never be able twice to get exactly the same thing. 1889
Blackshore, River Blythe, Suffolkfrom Emerson’s illustrated book ‘Pictures of East Anglian Life’, 1888
“At Plough, The End of the Furrow”, from Emerson’s photographic album ‘Pictures From Life in Field And Fen,’, 1887
Confessions from Emerson’s book ‘Pictures From Life in Field And Fen’, 1887
Peter Henry Emerson (13 May 1856 – 12 May 1936) was a British writer and photographer. Emerson was intelligent, well-educated and wealthy with a facility for clearly articulating his many strongly held opinions. His photographs are early examples of promoting photography as an art form. He is known for taking photographs that displayed natural settings and for his disputes with the photographic establishment about the purpose and meaning of photography.
Life
Emerson was born on La Palma Estate, a sugar plantation near Encrucijada, Cuba[1] belonging to his American father, Henry Ezekiel Emerson and British mother, Jane, née Harris Billing. He was a distant relative of Samuel Morseand Ralph Waldo Emerson. He spent his early years in Cuba on his father’s estate.
During the American Civil War he spent some time at Wilmington, Delaware, but moved to England in 1869, after the death of his father.
He was schooled at Cranleigh School where he was a noted scholar and athlete. He subsequently attended King’s College London, before switching to Clare College, Cambridge in 1879 where he earned his medical degree in 1885.
In 1881 he married Miss Edith Amy Ainsworth and wrote his first book while on his honeymoon.The couple eventually had five children.
He bought his first camera in 1881 or 1882 to be used as a tool on bird-watching trips with his friend, the ornithologist A. T. Evans. In 1885 he was involved in the formation of the Camera Club of London, and the following year he was elected to the Council of the Photographic Society and abandoned his career as a surgeon to become a photographer and writer. As well as his particular attraction to nature he was also interested in billiards, rowing and meteorology.
After the publication of Marsh Leaves in 1895, generally considered to be his best work, Emerson published no further photographs, though he continued writing and publishing books, both works of fiction and on such varied subjects as genealogy and billiards. In 1924, he started writing a history of artistic photography and completed the manuscript just before his death in Falmouth, Cornwall on 12 May 1936.
In 1979 he was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame.
Photography as art
Emerson’s passionate belief was that photography was an art and not a mechanical reproduction. In 1889 he published a controversial and influential book Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art, in which he explained his philosophy of art and straightforward photography. The book was described by one writer as “the bombshell dropped at the tea party” because of the case it made that truthful and realistic photographs would replace contrived photography. This was a direct attack on the popular tradition of combining many photographs to produce one image that had been pioneered by O. G. Reijlander and Henry Peach Robinson in the 1850s. Emerson denounced this technique as false and claimed that photography should be seen as a genre of its own, not one that seeks to imitate other art forms. All Emerson’s own pictures were taken in a single shot and without retouching, which was another form of manipulation that he strongly disagreed with, calling it “the process by which a good, bad, or indifferent photograph is converted into a bad drawing or painting”.
Emerson also believed that the photograph should be a true representation of that which the eye saw. He vehemently pursued this argument about the nature of seeing and its representation in photography, to the discomfort of the photographic establishment.
Initially influenced by naturalistic French painting, he argued for similarly “naturalistic” photography and took photographs in sharp focus to record country life as clearly as possible. His first album of photographs, published in 1886, was entitled Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads, and it consisted of 40 platinum prints that were informed by these ideas. See You Tube video of the photos
Before long, however, he became dissatisfied with rendering everything in sharp focus, considering that the undiscriminating emphasis it gave to all objects was unlike the way the human eye saw the world. He then experimented with soft focus. Following contemporary optical theories, he producedphotographs with one area of sharp focus while the remainder was unsharp. But he was unhappy with the results that this gave too, experiencing difficulty with accurately recreating the depth and atmosphere which he saw as necessary to capture nature with precision.
Despite his misgivings, he took many photographs of landscapes and rural life in the East Anglian fenlands and published seven further books of his photography through the next ten years. In the last two of these volumes, On English Lagoons(1893) and Marsh Leaves (1895), Emerson printed the photographs himself using photogravure, after having bad experiences with commercial printers.
His main photography books are:
Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads (1886) You Tube video of the photos
Pictures from Life in Field and Fen (1887) Google Images
In the end Emerson found that his defence of photography as art failed, and he had to allow that photography was probably a form of mechanical reproduction. The pictures the Robinson school produced may have been “mechanical”, but Emerson’s may still be considered artistic, since they were not faithful reproductions of a scene but rather having depth as a result of his one-plane-sharp theory. When he lost the argument over the artistic nature of photography, Emerson did not publicise his photographic work but still continued to take photographs.
Digital C-Types (also known as ‘lambda’ or ‘lightjet’) use a digital-analogue hybrid process. This is the method used by high street labs nowadays, regardless of whether you supply them with a roll of film or a memory card. Traditional silver halide photographic papers are used in a machine that exposes the paper to light from LEDs or lasers that are directed by a computer, as opposed to the light transmitted through a negative in the darkroom enlarger. Once exposed inside the machine, the paper is passed through the same chemistry as that used in the traditional colour darkroom.
Since digital C-types are all but indistinguishable from C-type prints made from a negative in the darkroom, galleries and collectors will happily accept these kinds of prints. Although C-types are not absolutely permanent (we have all seen faded family photographs) and aren’t as resilient as black and white photographs to UV light, they have at least been ‘tried and tested’ in real life, rather than just in laboratory simulations.
Video Comparison of inkjet and C-type printing processes
Sources
Digital C-types are only produced by professional labs and institutions. The costs associated with setting up and running the equipment are very high and this is not a realistic option for most individuals. But many companies offer C-Types for less than the price of inkjets.
Different labs providing C-type printing use different machines and different brands of papers that will produce subtly different results and varying levels of quality. Some companies often offer postal services, such as sending test strips for you to assess, so you can instruct their technicians to make any adjustments to the exposure or colour balance before making the final print. They will then store the adjusted file for any future editions.
Human vision is far superior to any camera in terms of the range of tones it can encompass within a single field of vision.
Early photographic emulsions were considerably more sensitive to blue light than to other colours on the spectrum of visible light. This meant that landscape photographs, particularly those made on clear days, had completely blown-out skies as the negatives were much denser in the skies than the foreground, resulting in loss of detail in the (positive) print.
Edward Muybridge made a library of clouds and skies that would be layered with a negative where the sky detail was absent in order to make photographs that were nearer to human perception.
The Zone System by Ansel Adams and Fred Archer (1889-1963) is a way to visualise how the tones visible in a scene can most effectively be rendered onto the photographic negative.
Adams (1981, 60) described the zone scale and its relationship to typical scene elements:
Zone
Description
0
Pure black
I
Near black, with slight tonality but no texture
II
Textured black; the darkest part of the image in which slight detail is recorded
III
Average dark materials and low values showing adequate texture
IV
Average dark foliage, dark stone, or landscape shadows
V
Middle gray: clear north sky; dark skin, average weathered wood
VI
Average Caucasian skin; light stone; shadows on snow in sunlit landscapes
VII
Very light skin; shadows in snow with acute side lighting
VIII
Lightest tone with texture: textured snow
IX
Slight tone without texture; glaring snow
X
Pure white: light sources and specular reflections
Adams (1981, 52) distinguished among three different exposure scales for the negative:
The full range from black to white, represented by Zone 0 through Zone X.
The dynamic range comprising Zone I through Zone IX, which Adams considered to represent the darkest and lightest “useful” negative densities.
The textural range comprising Zone II through Zone VIII. This range of zones conveys a sense of texture and the recognition of substance.
Adams and Archer sought to refine and better manage some if the many variables that affected exposure, such as developer formulae and development times, so that the photographer could more strictly control the contrast and range of tones rendered.
In reality both film and digital sensors can render many more ‘zones’ than just eleven. But reminds us that when you point a light meter at an object it reads it as mid grey (zone 5). Therefore the photographer has to decide where in the scene they wish Zone V to be in order to control exposure properly.
In colour photography this also needs to be adjusted to allow for the fact that different colours correspond to different tones – yellows are better slightly over-exposed while reds and blues under-exposed.
—————————————— TASK Demonstrate your awareness of the principles of the zone system and your ability to take accurate light readings by producing 3 photographs taken in relatively high dynamic range. The exposure should render as much detail as possible in the brightest and darkest areas of the photograph. Collate these and any reflections.
My reflections on the zone system:
The system sounds simple but in practice is quite complicated because much depends not only on the extreme white and black points where detail needs to be preserved, but the overall balance of dark and light tones that affect perception of clipping and also the desired key of the image for aesthetic reasons. This means that quite a lot of experimentation is needed to select the metering point that will give the desired result.
In digital photography, the important point is the preservation of detail in the image that will be available for post-processing rather than any ‘correct exposure’ in the unreliable LCD screen. It is therefore best to have the highlight clipping warning turned on, and also to review the histograms as one works.
In practice with images of the type of dynamic range I found on the sunniest day in winter, I could adjust both highlights in images exposed for the shadows and shadows in images exposed for the highlights equally easily to regain detail where I wanted them.
The zone system is certainly a useful guide, but will require a lot of practice to gain real confidence. Alternative methods are auto-bracketing, or using the camera’s matrix metering system together with the highlight clipping warning and exposure compensation where necessary. These two are arguably quicker unless I get really confident.
The Images
These images were taken along the river Cam on a sunny day. All the images had both slight black and slight white clipping and were just outside the Dynamic Range of my camera. I used Spot metering and experimented with different metering points to try and reflect the image I had in mind. Image 1: Graffiti
In Graffiti my interest was in maintaining detail in the sunlight on the silver graffiti rather than the dark bridge.
My first attempt took as mid grey the bright grass at the back assuming this was a mid-tone. But this image was much lighter than I wanted with too much clipping on the graffiti and very washed-out. Although the grass was mid-tone for the image as a whole, it was not mid-tone for the image I wanted.
My second attempt took the lighter path as the mid-tone. This then pushed all the other tones darker, giving me more detail on the graffiti.
In post-processing in Lightroom I found though that there was not much difference in what I could do with the image – adjusting the highlights, shadows, exposure and contrast I could achieve pretty much the same effect with either image.
Image 2: Bridge
In this image I wanted to highlight the dot of the duck and I was also interested in the white detail and reflections of the V shapes. Again I was not so interested in the shadows except as background contrast.
This second image was also just outside the dynamic range of my camera with both slight black and white clipping. But because the very white area takes up less of the image, choosing the grass as mid grey worked better because the smaller area of highlight clipping is less noticeable. I took further shots using the water, but that lightened the image too much. Metering from the lighter sky at the back became too dark.
Image 3: Wier
In this third image the dynamic range was not as great as it first appeared except for some bright sparkles on the water. The blacks were just within range. The image on the left was spot metered on the water, pushing everything too dark – the spot metre picked up the very tiny bright sparkles rather than the larger grey areas between. The second image I metered on the white water bottom left giving a wider tonal range.
SLR Camera Sensor
My second attempt took the lighter path as the mid-tone. This then pushed all the other tones darker, giving me more detail on the graffiti.
