Place the shadow. Place the highlight.

[DREW WILEY]

Yeah, AA stated the same thing in some of his filmed interviews too. It was all about his inability to "manipulate" it. But his friends were manipulating color all kinds of ways; dye transfer was basically "Photoshop" prior to photoshop. I think the die was simply cast in his case. He also stated how he always had to start with a quieter or less contrasty image project in the darkroom before a bolder one, rather than visa versa, or his tonal sensitivity would get messed up. Personal peculiarities. Maybe just too many finicky "longhair" musical genes in him.

I don't have any problem going back and forth, nor working with both color and black and white - nor can I play music! My piano teacher as a child gave me dirty looks every time he saw me, until he finally died when I was over 50.

 

[wiltw]

Although I do not employ Zone system for B&W, I do employ the thread title for exposure of color emulsions and digital...

• Place the shadow (for exposure of color negative)
• Place the highlight (for exposure of color transparency and digital)

...because color negative gets muddy color when underexposed, and color transparency (and digital) lose detail when overexposed.

 

[DREW WILEY]

It might be wise to measure your shadow and highlight color repro limits when shooting any kind of color film, but this needs to be done with respect to both directions, shadow versus highlight, and in relation to the exact film type being used, not just in a generic color neg versus transparency sense. They're not all the same, even within those two respective categories. Those old stereotypes don't work very well anymore, and never really did. One has to know at what place along the scale specific hues saturate, and what priority to give to those when strategizing exposure.

 

[GregY]

Re the opening post, the discontinued & much-lamented Polaroid PN55 4x5 provided the user both a positive & a negative. If you wanted a good negative to print with afterwards (what many aficionados loved about PN55)..... you exposed for the negative.... (expose for shadows)....if your desire was a lovely 4x5 instant print...then you exposed for the highlights. It was a superb now-gone fim.

 

[Chuck_P]

Ansel Adams wrote in some of his books that manipulating color was more limited than black &n white, and that color would go unrealistic once outside a narrow band. Therefore he preferred to concentrate black & white.

I believe it was something like this..................there's only so much I can do with color before it becomes obviously unreal.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Yeah, that was a memorable phrase from a documentary about him, spoken directly by him. Of course, unreal looking color scenery run amuck is the rage of today.

 

[Sirius Glass]

I believe it was something like this..................there's only so much I can do with color before it becomes obviously unreal.

Yeah, that was a memorable phrase from a documentary about him, spoken directly by him. Of course, unreal looking color scenery run amuck is the rage of today.

Thats the words he used.

 

[Vaughn]

Yeah, that was a memorable phrase from a documentary about him, spoken directly by him. Of course, unreal looking color scenery run amuck is the rage of today.

As well as unreal contrast in deep shadow areas (begins to look like a photograph of a museum diorama).

 

[DREW WILEY]

Once those kinds of digital snapshots with their watered-down shadows started showing up in National Geographic, especially on their new matte paper, I cancelled my subscription. It was the latest app rage at the time, though at the moment I forget the exact term for it.

 

[Chuck_P]

Are you guys referring the HDR.........High Dynamic Range capability, that's when I see clearly unrealistic shadows in digitally processed black and white..

 

[DREW WILEY]

Yeah, I remembered the term later last night. HDR has several relevant definitions : Overdone fad, Obnoxious waste of a camera, One more silly App. Of course, I'm not referring to the tool itself, which is capable of being intelligently employed in the right hands, but of the all too predictable over-the-top new toy mentality which plagued our eyes when it first became overtly popular.