The message comes back to me along these lines:

• I spent a lot of money on a camera that takes all the responsibility for exposure and focussing to leave me free to be more 'creative'.
• The Zone system was used 50 years ago by people like Ansel Adams, and he's dead now.
• It's old fashioned now that we are in the computer age - it's past its sell-by date - and we can do things better with new technology.

In fact, the zone system needn't be complicated at all to give a simple practical working method, but I can well understand people being either baffled by it or simply not wanting to pursue their photography through the precise measurements and tables of the more extreme zone system experts, no matter how exact they are.

Even so, the reality is that we can't choose to work without the zone system. It is simply what actually happens. The only questions are:
1. "Do I understand what is happening?" and
2. "Can I control what is happening to achieve the result I want?"
Trying to pretend that it isn't happening is a little like a chef saying "I'm going to prepare a great dish, but I don't know how to cook and I can't be bothered to learn". Or perhaps a better comparison might be "I am going to prepare a gourmet meal, but I can't be bothered to learn how to cook it - I'll just pop a ready-made meal in the microwave".

Nevertheless, the reality is that, but for the tiny minority who love, understand and apply the whole zone system approach that puts them in control, the vast majority of monochrome photographers just don't want to struggle through the learning process. It's a turn off.

Yet how do we square that with the necessity to have a fine negative for a fine print. This letter came through my Workshop door in January.

"Dear Mr. Thornton, I went to my copy of 'Elements' and read the Technical Preface. I have listened to speakers on the zone system, and have read about it over the years and it is becoming more inaccessible with each attempt to understand it. Yet I know I need better negs." As the lady said in the letter "being a lady of mature years (old in years but very young at heart as it transpired) I feel time is at a premium, so I either give up photography or think laterally…what I need is a short cut".

That made a lot of sense to me. And if I could work out a practical short cut for her, it seemed to me that there would be a lot more photographers out there who would value the method of avoiding all the zone system hassle, yet still get fine negatives.

When I thought about it, the answer was simple, and it is something I use daily as a monitoring device for my own and my clients' work without another thought. Yet instructing seminars and workshops with many participants constantly shows me how unaware photographers are of this powerful tool to achieve negatives that print like a dream. Indeed, the tool is routinely abused by those who should know much better.
What is this magic short cut tool?
The contact sheet.

"The contact sheet", I hear you respond. "I thought you were going to come up with something new and exciting". Actually, it's something old and exciting. The excitement comes from seeing for the first time in positive form whether the pictures we visualised at the time we pressed the button actually materialised. And that's just the problem. We become so involved with the subject matter of the pictures in each frame that we completely miss all the other priceless information the contact sheet contains, and the simple clear answers it provides to our problems without the hassle of zone system testing.

What normally happens when we get a contact sheet from 35mm or medium format made at a commercial processor, or even when we print our own? There will often be different shots made at different exposures in different lighting conditions on the same roll. So that we can see the image content on as many frames as possible, we use the softest grade of paper, give it plenty of exposure, and we maybe pull the print a little if it starts to 'overcook'. Sure this sloppy method is economic for a commercial lab just wanting to push out as many contacts as it can in a day, and it makes it easier to see what's in each picture. But it completely loses vital information that would turn 'microwave man' into master chef.

Continued ...