Ansel adams and the zone system explained

Ansel Adams’ Zone System is genius. It’s how I learned to expose black and white film, and it’s so easy once you understand it and know how to use it. I use it all the time while photographing personal work, both indoors and outdoors in natural light. I’ve found that it works well for both color and black and white film, although Ansel’s system was initially set up to determine his vision for tonal values in a black and white film exposure to then create a beautiful print.

If you’re not familiar, his zone system looks like this (courtesy ofWikipedia, my best friend):

The 11 zones in Ansel Adams’ system were defined to represent the gradation of all the different tonal values you would see in a black and white print, with zone 5 being middle gray, zone 0 being pure black (with no detail), and zone 10 being pure white (with no detail).

Theoretically, each zone represents one f-stop in exposure. You’ll also notice there is then an 11-stop difference between pure The Zone System - GOCOQ