Let's discuss your method of applying the Zone System

You can totally Zone System digital. The happy thing is that if you get the "development" wrong, then you get to do it again.

Meter the highlights and shadows, shoot for an exposure that will balance them around the middle per your taste (ETTR? Just half/half? ETTL? Whatever you like. But remember that you have something like 12 stops +/- to play with). You can probably just wing this step, to be honest, but if you enjoy

"Shadews at 20 candles peh meteh squahed, place shadews on zewn wun. Highlights at 5000 candles peh meteh squahed place highlights on zewn 0. normahl minus tew developmint indicated."

and then write all that down, by all means. It's definitely fun nerdy stuff.

Then do a RAW conversion with a suitable development curve to bring the shadows and highlights wherever you visualized them. You could probably do some presets in whatever your preferred RAW converter to do normal/+/- development.

(As for how I shoot, well, I wing it, and chimp a lot, and then fuss around in converters and editors until it looks right. Which is not the Zone System. At All.)

The relationship between film exposure, film development and film tone response does not exist when you expose a digital sensor. Extending the time your sensor sits in a tank of HC-110 won't have any effect on the data it records.

You can simulate all kinds of things digitally. You can simulate film grain in a digital image. You won't have film grain when you're done but you can have a simulation. There's got to be a reason for the simulation e.g. you like the look of film grain. You can simulate Zone System exposure and processing digitally as suggested, but for what reason. In this case you're conducting a simulation that produces an inferior result with no benefit. Zone System photographers use the technique to get the best possible result given less than ideal circumstances. Those same people using a digital camera still want the best possible result and so they change their technique to match the tool.

"Expose for the shadows and process for the highlights" is the wrong way to treat a digital sensor. With a digital sensor you expose for the highlights and process for the highlights, midtones and shadows to get the best result.

Joe
 
If you're a purist about what Zone System means, sure.

If you think that what it means is a set of ideas and methods which can and should be adapted to the materials at hand to manage the final result in a predictable way then you're me, or you just agree with me.

Adams was on my side, by the way.
 
For me part of the process that is the same between film and digital is trying to determine the best exposure for a particular scene. I agree that in general I do not want to expose for the shadows in digital, otherwise I will have unrecoverable highlights (of course sometimes I go with that).
Using the Matrix metering I find that I can usually add 1/3 to 2/3 of a stop to the exposure and then in post I drop highlights and raise shadows, but I don't have to raise the exposure. A bit of contrast and usually adjust the white point and generally more black. This would be what I would have done with the sample image given as I usually start there for a landscape in LightRoom.
The Zone System sounds good as a guide for what one can capture with the available tools in order to make the final image. But how to learn to apply it quickly in the field.
 
Pick an object/subject in the scene, identify which Zone it's in, meter for that zone, take pictures, world peace is achieved. :D
 
With all due respect to Joe, I think the "Zone System" as practiced by club photographers, is a technique used to gain pecking order rank depending on how convincingly the claimant can refute the naysayers. Claiming either Adams or Acher as ancestors or family add additional bonus points until disproved. Allows the "wet print" guys to hold their noses higher than the inkjet print aficionados.
 
With all due respect to Joe, I think the "Zone System" as practiced by club photographers, is a technique used to gain pecking order rank depending on how convincingly the claimant can refute the naysayers. Claiming either Adams or Acher as ancestors or family add additional bonus points until disproved. Allows the "wet print" guys to hold their noses higher than the inkjet print aficionados.

No argument from me there. A career in academia taught me the same lesson.

Joe
 
However, Sparky deserves a real answer. In my case, I know (from testing) what the dynamic range is of my camera. So I would spot-meter the scene and determine what is the dynamic range of the stuff that needs to have detail (both at the highlight and shadow ends). If if fits within the dynamic range of my camera, then I would adjust my exposure so that the stuff that would normally go into Zone VII would be exposed at 3 stops over the meter reading. I've got Magic Lantern firmware loaded on my camera, and it has a feature where you can get the value (0-255) of a particular point. So using this tool, I'd put the Zone VII stuff at 245. This usually gives me enough latitude to be able to get detail in the zone.

If the overall scene exceeds the dynamic range of my camera, then it will depend on by how much. I usually squeeze another stop out of the image (at either end) when working with RAW. If it's several stops, then some form of HDR becomes necessary.
 
Why do you need the value out of Magic Lantern, pgriz?

Can't you just spot meter the highlight, and then "overexpose" from that EV by three stops? Which you are evidently doing, so, I don't understand what the ML step is.
 
I've never even heard of the "Zone System"...

And probably not too many in the UK do either. Here's your chance at notoriety! Forkie's Zone System as adapted to the UK weather conditions. Following the BCU methods, you could then set up a whole organization to preach photographic salvation to the uncultured heathens (ie those outside the UK).
 
Why do you need the value out of Magic Lantern, pgriz?

Can't you just spot meter the highlight, and then "overexpose" from that EV by three stops? Which you are evidently doing, so, I don't understand what the ML step is.

In the end, it's the same thing. However, what it does is take the reading off the JPG image displayed on the live-view monitor, and allows me to put the "sensor" anywhere on the displayed image. I already know (from other testing) that if the brightness value of that point is at 245, I can see enough detail in it on my computer monitor. And since I always shoot both RAW + JPG, I know I have some reserve available to me (from the RAW) at the high and low ends.
 
The lighting suggests we're dealing with overcast. That compresses the brightness range. I'd not bother with the zone system for this scene but rather take an overall meter reading and bracket. I work in B&W film, btw.
 

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