![]() We need to expose for the highlights and ‘develop’ for the shadows and midtones. Therefore, in digital photography, images should be exposed to make sure that little or no highlight areas are completely lost. Just as too little exposure creates large black areas when printing from negatives, overexposing digital images can create large white areas with no detail. ![]() ![]() However, the principles can be reversed and used for the positive images created by transparency film and digital sensors. Black and white landscapes: Highlights and shadowsĪdams’ system was designed with negative film in mind. This allows for a full range of tones to be reproduced, provided the image has been taken with the optimum exposure. He could recover highlight detail through selective development and printing of both the negative and print. Adams realised that if only a little light reaches the negative, no detail of that area is recorded and any resulting prints merely show an area of dense black.Īdams’ compromise was to expose the negative so that enough shadow detail could be shown when the image was printed. When shooting on black and white negative film, Adams’ axiom was ‘Expose for the shadows, develop for the highlights’. However, but when it was devised it had as much to do with making sure that every expensive 10x8in plate or negative could be successfully printed as it did with artistic principle. The Zone System that Adams and Fred Archer formulated still has a huge influence on landscape photographers today. His methodical way of exposing black and white negative film was designed to allow for a full tonal range to be produced at the printing stage. It would be difficult to write a feature on metering for black and white landscapes without mentioning Ansel Adams. Two of the most important zones are zones three and seven – zone three represents a shadow area with texture, and zone seven represents highlight area with detail. In his system, pure black was represented by zone 0, middle grey (18% grey) at zone 5 and pure white at 10. This is a reference to the system devised and mastered by Ansel Adams. Tonal ranges are often referred to as zones or a ‘zone system’. This picture has been reduced to just black and white, with virtually no shades of grey at all, to striking effect. Shooting in Raw mode will help because it offers a greater range of tones – being 8-bit there are only 256 possible shades of grey with a jpeg, but 12-bit Raw files can record 4096. With landscapes, you do have time to consider your settings and bracket your results. With digital capture it’s harder to get detail back from overexposed areas than from those that are underexposed. However, if you fail to make a good initial exposure you’re restricting the potential quality of your results, as there will be less recorded information to work with. Post-production can amend exposure inaccuracies to a degree. ![]() Too much and you’ll lose the highlights too little and you’ll lose the shadows. ![]() In order to record the maximum spread of tones from the darkest to the lightest, without losing the detail in either, you must get your exposure right. However, it will depend to a great extent on the subject and on the lighting conditions. In general, a well-exposed image will give you the widest possible range of tones between these two extremes. Tonal rangeīlack and white landscape photography is composed of a tonal range of greys that fall between black and white. This will give you a greater chance of success than simply running random images through the desaturate feature of your software to see what happens. You need to be able to see a scene in these terms, and to pre-visualise it as your final black and white print. Black and white’s intrinsic nature, which pares every scene down to a palette of shades of grey, lends itself to a different aesthetic – one which is more about tone, form and texture. This scene looks great in reality, but in black and white those contrasting bands of colour reproduce as the same shade of mid-grey, resulting in a boring imageįew things in photography are as impressive as a great black and white landscape.īut if you want to create masterpieces worthy of hanging on your wall there’s a different mind-set for shooting black and white compared to colour, which you’ll need to key yourself into.Ĭolour photography relies on how different colours are juxtaposed and complemented by each other. Not all landscapes look as good in mono as they do in colour. ![]()
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