The Zone System and is it Dead?

Recently on Twitter and probably elsewhere on social media there has been a bit of tension surrounding an article declaring the death of the Zone System. For the record I don’t believe the Zone System is dead, I think it’s as valid today as it’s ever been and there are many, many photographers using it to make awesome photographs.

If you don’t know what the Zone System is, I’ve provided some resources at the end of the post. Now, having said that, I don’t actually use the Zone System, not because it’s not valid, it just doesn’t suit my style of shooting. For a start I shoot only 135 and 120 roll films, there are articles that show you how the Zone System can still be applied to roll films (again resources linked at the end), but it’s too slow and convoluted for me. I’m a run and gun type of shooter, I see something I’ll take one or two shots and I’m off. I’m not the kind of guy to meter different areas of a scene, then do some calculations blah, blah.

If I shot Large Format and I was paying circa £5 per shot, it would be a different matter. Each shot counts with Large Format, you can’t afford to get your exposure wrong. With roll film however I don’t feel the need to be as careful, for me it’s about acceptable exposure rather than perfect/correct exposure. I don’t need my exposures to be perfect, I just need them to be good enough and on the whole I believe they are. I am absolutely positive (see what I did there) that my negatives wouldn’t stand up to close scrutiny. Anybody who really knows what they are about would look at my negatives and see lack of shadow detail or blown highlights and who knows what else. But for me they are good enough, most of the time anyway, some shots have absolutely horrible exposure, but 99% are good enough.

Metering Method

My metering method is pretty simple, I’m not saying it’s ideal or that anyone else should use it, but it’s what works for me. I use the same method whether I’m shooting Black and White or Colour, it doesn’t matter to me. The only time I change my method is when I shoot slide film, that’s a different matter entirely and maybe the subject of a future post. I shoot at either box speed or if in really low light or doing street photography where I need higher shutter speeds I will push the film a few stops.

When I’m outside I don’t tend to use a meter I just use Sunny 16 to get an initial exposure and then I will add a stop or 2 of exposure (see I told you it wasn’t scientific), usually by slowing the shutter speed. If I then enter an area that is in a lot of shadow I might add another stop. If I’m inside I will use a handheld or in camera meter and again add 1 or 2 stops. It’s that simple, I’d rather err on the side of over exposure than under.

Developing and Scanning

When I develop my negatives at home, I develop for slightly less time than recommended, to tame the highlights from over exposure. Again. not very scientific I know, I go by gut feel a lot of the time.

In my experience when I’ve under exposed a shot there’s not much I can do to recover it, but when over exposed, highlights can be recovered nicely. This seems to be true for scanning negatives, this may not be the case when wet printing. I’ve not had the opportunity to wet print yet, there are no darkrooms near me and I don’t have the room for my own. This where some people will say “if you’re just going to scan your photos why don’t you just shoot digital?”, well I’m going to leave the answer to that for a future blog post too.

Conclusion

Like I said at the beginning of the post this isn’t exactly original, I didn’t come up with this method (if you can really call it a method). The method is loosely along the same lines of metering for the shadows, develop for the highlights. I could go on about exposure latitude of negative films (yawn), but I won’t, I’ll leave that to those much cleverer than me. At the end of the day use what ever method work for you. If you’re a perfectionist looking for the absolute best negatives for printing or scanning, you’re looking in the wrong place. If however you want acceptably good negatives with very little effort, give it a try.

Resources

A Strategy for Using the Zone System with 35mm and Medium Format
Sunny 16 Rule
The Zone System
Massive Dev Chart

My Workflow

1. Assign Number to Roll

Every roll of film that I load into one of my cameras gets logged into a spreadsheet and assigned a number 0001, 0002 etc. I have a worksheet per year so the numbering gets reset every year and the full reference for a roll would be for example 20160001. At this point I also log the date the film was loaded, the name of the film, it’s format, ISO, EI, type, number of exposures on the roll and which camera is was loaded in to.In the last couple of columns, not shown here I enter comments and details about any projects the photos might be associated with.

2016 Worksheet

2. Shoot

[Updated: 2017-05-23] While out shooting I use Shoot Film Co’s Photomemo notebooks and a Lamy Pico pen to record basic details i.e. roll number, camera, film, EI and shooting conditions. I can refer back to this via the roll number if needed.

A sample page from my Photomemo book

3. Develop the Film

Once I’ve shot the film, I eventually get around to developing it, once the development is done I add more information to the worksheet. I add development date, developer, dilution, development time, temperature, agitation method, stop bath used, stop time, fixer used and fixing time. Currently I only develop my own B&W film, colour I send away to be developed, in this case I will just add the date that is was sent away and under developer I would put the company that did the development.

2016 Worksheet, Developing Data

4. Scan the Negatives

I now scan the negatives into a folder on my local d: drive into a folder called scans and a sub folder for each roll. Use the following naming convention for the sub folder yyyyMMdd – yyyyref, using the scan date an example would be 20160203 – 20160001. The files will be named 20160001-01.tif, 2016001-02.tif etc. With this naming convention I can link the scan back to the spreadsheet easily. I add the scanning details to the spreadsheet.

2016 Worksheet, Scanning Details

5. Store the Negatives

I use CXD Timecare ringbinder boxes and Print File negative sleeves to store my negatives. I’d previously used Kenro negative sleeves but found it really difficult to insert the negatives so switched to the Print File ones, which are much, much better. I have one binder per year and the negatives get stored in the order on the spreadsheet and labelled with the spreadsheet reference ie 20160001, 20160002 etc. All types and formats are mixed together, 135, 120, colour, B&W and cameras, I can find the negatives I need using the spreadsheet.

6. Import the Scans into Lightroom

Once the negatives are stored away safely I import the scans into Lightroom, this process copies the scans onto an external drive and are stored in the following folder structure, yyyy\MM based on the date the film was shot. I assign basic keywords on import such as the reference 20160001, 20160002 etc, plus the camera, film and any other useful information that will help me filter my library. The scans are stored along side my digital images. By having the reference as a keyword, I can cross reference the spreadsheet or find the physical negatives if I need to. So, if I later find an image in my Lightroom library that maybe I want to rescan, get wet printed or find more information about how it was developed, I can get the reference from the keyword which I can then look up in the spreadsheet or in the appropriate negative storage folder.

7. Backups

By this stage I already have the original scans on my internal drive and on an external drive where my Lightroom photo library is located. As I am very paranoid about losing my images, I have a second external drive attached to my computer that I use to further backup my data. I use a program called Goodsync that monitors changes to my files and automatically backs them up to the second external drive. This setup hopefully covers me for hard drive failures, but I also worry about something more serious happening that would mean I lost all my local and external hard drives, to guard against this I use Backblaze to backup to the cloud. For $5 a month I get unlimited automated cloud backups, if anything happens to my on site data, I can either download it all from their site or for a fee they will send me a drive with my data on.