PHOTOGRAPHY EXPOSED

by John Peters A.R.P.S.



  

ZONE SYSTEM

What is the Zone System? It's a system designed to produce a symplified method for establishing tonality within any given image. You can look this up on the Internet for a detailed explanation but if your a 'beginner' in photography, you don't need to worry about the Zone System too much. It was developed for film but is still effective with digital. I never got grips with it in detail and I don't think my photography suffered terribly through not knowing it.

TOP TIP Learn when to burn, when to dodge. That's far more important in my book and is the real secret to creative photography IMO. Selective burning and dodging, not just burning or dodging the complete photo or area. Again if you are a 'beginner', burning and dodging can be omitted and included as part of more advanced editing. BRACKETING is a useful technique should you want to use the HDR technique on this image and it also covers any possible exposure errors that you might make. Bracket, bracket, bracket. It's cheap now, covers most errors in exposure, and you only need to keep/file those winning shots, delete the rest.



An example of burning/dodging
If you are a beginner, forget about burning and dodging, you can look into that later.

Keep things as simple as possible. A very early photograph of mine (on film negative) where burning and dodging were to used extensively to darken the bits of the image I felt weren't 'as important', and to dodge the mug, chair and clocking in card to create a triangle of interesting objects to lend more force to the idea behind the image. On reflection, I'd perhaps have burned in the clocking-in machine a bit more, or cropped out the right hand side to omit the clocking-in machine altogether. With later assessment, I'm certain most of my images could be improved with further editing. This photograph tells a story though and that's a good technique to use.