The first thing we covered was The Zone System, devised by Ansel Adams (also called the Adams Zone System). It was originally intended for photography but translates easily into the medium of film.
What it is:
The Zone System takes the full black and white range of graduation and breaks it down into 11 Zones
Full Tonal Gradation
Eleven Step Gradation
How it works:
Each Zone represents the addition or subtraction of a stop in Aperture, Shutter Speed or ISO - it can also be a combination of two or more of these three factors (they are all considered to be Exposure Values - EV's - so each Zone is up or down one EV).
How we can use it:
The Zone System provides filmmakers and photographers with the information of how bright certain parts of the image should be - each zone representing a certain range of shades we see in everyday life. Adams and his collaborator Fred Archer established what tones looked normal to what objects or features looked normal to the human eye at what shades.
| 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 |
E.g. Middle Gray - Zone 5
Middle Gray is the Range of gradation used for darker human skin tones and is usually what light metres measure for.
Kind of like setting white balance - where you tell the camera what white for the scene will be - with light metering you are determining what middle gray in the scene should be and exposing for that.
Zone 4 is lighter human skin, 8 is detail in the blacks, 8-9 are light sources or sharp reflections, with 0 being pitch black and 10 being pure white.
LIGHT METRES
Analog
Attachments:
- Lumisphere
- Lumidisc
- Lumigrid
Each of these serve a different purpose, the one we will mainly be applying is the lumisphere - used for incidental readings.
Photo Experiments
In class we took out the Nikon D90's and took photos with different focal lengths, ISO and Apertures using the light metres to determine what we needed.
PHOTOS (IN B&W TO FIT THE THEME)
It's pretty coincidental that on the same day we learned this, Filmmaker IQ released this video:
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