Exercise

Demonstrate your awareness of the principles of the Zone System and your ability to take accurate light readings by producing three photographs taken in relatively high dynamic range, i.e. contrasting light conditions. Make sure that your exposure choice renders as much detail as possible in the brightest and darkest areas of the photograph.

Interpretation

I decided to adapt this exercise slightly to take account of using a digital camera and software in post-capture. I wanted to demonstrate an image taken as per the exercise but then also to compare and contrast this with images created using the camera’s judgement, rather than my own, and also to create a version using Lightroom to merge images created using the camera’s auto-bracketing feature.

Using all three techniques demonstrates an appreciation of how each works, but also gives me the understanding to choose the appropriate technique in future image captures.

Images

My chosen scene is one that includes a very broad dynamic range . This contrast is made difficult to capture given that the reflection in the water makes up a considerable part of the image and prohibits the use of a graduated ND filter.

Automatic Setting

In this image, the settings have been left to the camera itself. I set the exposure method to be an average reading across the entire image rather than choosing a specific exposure point (which would have allowed me to choose a specific area of the image as the mid point.

The result is an image that has a largely blown sky and underexposed land. I have not made any adjustments to the image in lightroom. If I had, I could have lifted the brightness of the trees which are shown underexposed to a degree but not completely black.

In general the image approximates to an average mid-level exposure but hardly any of the image is at a level that I would choose.

User Defined Setting

This is image what the exercise asks for, I metered for the trees in the foreground to be the mid-level, in the knowledge that this would cause even more of the sky to blown. I made this decision because the foreground forms the main part of the image and using the zone system, this is what I selected as my mid point whilst considering the impact it would have in darker and lighter areas.

The image as shown is more visually appealing than the automatic exposure – my own deliberations and thinking of the zone system worked. However, this is at a cost of sky detail and actually it would have been better to let the camera find an approximate mid point for the image as a whole and then adjust elements of the image later in Lightroom. That said, if I had no option for later adjustments, this zoning approach would be a better image than would be produced by the camera left to its own choices.

HDR Image

This image was created by setting my camera to create three bracketed exposures automatically and then using Lightroom to merge the images into a singe one. I chose, three shots worth bracketing with a span of 1.5 stops per image. I then used Lightroom to merge these into a single image which is the one shown here – in common with the other images in this exercise, I did not go on to then adjust the merged image.

In this shot the sky is considerably less blown, and the land is correctly composed across the scene.

Conclusion

Each approach has produced an output that has merits.

The camera’s auto settings (a Nikon Z7 which has a very capable sensor) managed to capture nearly the full dynamic range of the scene and although the starting image is a little dull and parts of the sky are blown, that could be adjusted post capture.

Manual settings allowed me to create a more ‘ready to use’ image but has actually created something with more blown elements than the auto image.

Bracketing and Software HDR has produced the most versatile image ahead of further post capture adjustments.

The learning from the exercise is:

• Understand the merits of each approach and make a capture choice accordingly.
• These outcomes are camera specific, a less able sensor may not have coped with the full dynamic range in the way that my auto-setting capture did. It is important to understand the capabilities of the actual camera being used and of the software that will be used post-capture
• The zone system does work. Actively considering exposure choices for each element of the image produced the most appealing image directly from the camera. One can use this system to visualise an image and then move on to choosing the best approach for capturing that image.