Digital BW, The Print

I didn't say he wasn't prepared. And Ansel said in his own accounts that 
he couldn't find a meter quickly enough, so he made a guess based on his 
experience:

 From his book "Examples, The Making of 40 Photographs" where he talks 
about making this photograph, he says "I was at a loss with the subject 
luminance values, and I confess I was thinking of bracketing several 
exposures..." and "The white crosses were on the edge of sunlight and 
reasonably "safe"; the shaded foreground was of very low value. Had I 
known how low it was I would have given at least 50 percent more 
exposure..."

He guessed. And made a pretty darn good guess, due to his huge amount of 
experience.

Hey look - I'm a big Ansel fan. Don't think I'm putting him down; 
nothing could be farther from the truth. But Ansel said that this image 
wasn't made using the deliberate approach he himself advocated and 
taught. This to my mind makes it a poor image with which to judge the 
Zone System. And that's the point I was trying to make.
--
Bruce Watson


Brian Ellis wrote:

> "He couldn't find a light meter, so he guessed. "
>
> Well if you consider knowing the luminance of the moon in candle feet off
> the top of your head,  also knowing off the top of your head that you can
> take the square root of the film speed and convert it to an exposure by
> using the reciprocal of the luminance expressed in candle feet, doing 
> that
> calculation in your head and applying that knowledge to determine that 
> the
> luminance of the moon fell on Zone VII, then from that calculating the 
> Zone
> V luminance and the resulting exposure, and finally applying  a 3x filter
> factor to that calculated exposure to arrive at a final exposure of 1 
> second
> at f32, all while frantically setting up an 8x10 camera to make a 
> photograph
> while the light was disappearing, to be "guessing," I guess you could 
> say he
> guessed. : - )