An Alternative to the Zone System for Digital Photography

By Simon Forsyth

I suggest you make a table with the shutter speed on the bottom row and the EV values above. So, 1/250 will have EV 0 above it, 1/200 will have 1/3 above it, etc, until you come to +5EV at the right end.

To put this into practice, use a Spot meter, either the in-camera one or a handheld one. Choose the area in the scene you want to place as the brightest white in the image. (Don’t use the sun as looking at it will damage your eye! Also, the sun will always blow out except at sunrise/sunset.) Spot meter the area above and apply the exposure bias that you measured before. Shoot the image!

What you are doing in effect, for those who understand the Zone System, is placing the metered point in Zone 9.

While this is a good method for landscape photography where the scene doesn’t move, it won’t work for street photography etc where things change rapidly! To deal with these situations I suggest you use this method:

Use the multizone metering pattern in your camera.

Create three bracketed images. The three exposures should be +1 1/3rd more than the camera’s recommended exposure. The other two should be +2/3rd and +2 stops from the first exposure. So, the three exposures should be +2/3rds stop, +1/3rd Stops, +2 Stops. DiNatale recommends that you adjust the sequence of the bracketed exposures to set it to 0/-/+. This will be beneficial in post-processing to show the base exposure followed by the bracketed exposures.

In the film days, a good Black and White negative was one that you could read the newspaper through. In the digital age, an optimum image looks as if it was dipped in milk.

Looking at the three images in the screenshot to the right, the optimal exposure would be the middle one. That is the one that you should process to produce the maximum detail and the least noise in the shadows. If you look at the histogram you can see that there is no clipping in the shadows.

While the method using multi-zone metering (it has different names for each camera manufacturer) may not be quite as accurate, for general shooting situations it should be accurate enough to get an image that has the maximum amount of detail.

When you import the images into your processing software (I use Lightroom) look at the three images together when you are using the multi-zone metering method. You can stack each set of exposures and look at them together to find the best exposure. The exposure you want is the one in which the highlight warnings do not obscure the highlight detail. Specular highlights and the sun can be ignored. This exposure will ensure there is detail, even in the blacks!

When you use the Auto Develop button in Lightroom, the Exposure slider should be in the negative range! After selecting the optimum exposure you can delete the bracketed images! The spot metering method should often negate the need for HDR bracketing as it will ensure the highlights won’t blow out (apart from specular highlights and the sun), while ensuring there is detail in the shadows and minimal noise! Also, when used with high ISOs the noise will be less!

Bob DiNatale has also written Processing the Digital Image, a companion to The Optimum Digital Exposure. Having not yet read this I will endeavour to do an article on it for a future CT The link to download the books is https://www.bobdinatale.com/books/. The hard copy versions appear to be out of print, but because they have just been updated, they may be available in future. DiNatale also allows the books to be printed from the PDF download for personal use.