Digital BW, The Print

Steve, there are/were two divergant Zone System tendencies. 

One emphasized number assignment, the other emphasized
previsualization. Two sides of the same coin, appeal IMO to two
fundamentally different kinds of personality. 

You're right that Zone System doesn't simply mean "previsualization,"
but previsualization is central to it. 

Post-processing that's not the result of previsualization is (IMO)
outside Zone System, a matter of manipulation (not a negative IMO).

I happen to resonate more with what I understand, from several of his
students, to be Minor White's angle on Zone System rather than Ansel
Adams'. 

I think Minor's angle emphasized previsualization more than Ansel's.
Minor's students were printing masters but they didn't seem very
interested in densitometry and were obviously drawn to strongly 
emotional images more than to beautiful rock and water with subtle
tonal scales. Like Weston, a better printer early on than Ansel, Minor
appealed more to sensualists.

From small dealings in the Seventies with Ansel and his students, and
from following his books and later work, it seems to me that he grew
more technically than visually with age, the opposite of Minor's growth. 

In Ansel's last (perhaps) book project he focused on quantitative
technical matters (scanning and lithography). This is honorable, an
extension of his angle on the Zone System that he began with Minor White. 

Minor, on by contrast, was a Zen practitioner who photographed people,
content, and meaning...a different side of the brain with different
passions, employing a different angle on the Zone System. Ansel was
also a fine people photographer who could make eloquent connections,
but some forget that in their enthusiasm for numbers.

Minor's Zone System game seemed to make the image he wanted to make. I
think Ansel's was more a matter of process for its own sake...workflow.

++++ Photography and printmaking are part of a continuum and that this
is sometimes forgotten by people at the extremes of the continuum. 

Djon



--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, Steve Kale
<stevekale@b...> wrote:
> Firstly I did not assert that pre-visualisation was no longer relevant.
> Secondly, the Zone system has nothing to do with black and white per
se - it
> is merely a system for determining appropriate exposure when such
exposure
> can not be significantly "altered" post shutter release.  All the Zone
> system does is provide a rigorous framework for determining middle
exposure
> and an understanding as to how the rest of the elements will be
exposed as a
> result.