Zone III meter or print down.

[Doremus Scudder]

But this IS what he says (I'm referring to his book, not the youtube video which is just an excerpt for a workshop). He says Zone III is wrong - period. In my opinion that's a teaching problem (not that I'm defending Zone III etc.). He has his way of doing things, and is obviously an excellent worker, but he shouldn't make authoritative statements about things like this. Based on his working methods, he can't know where Zone III or IV falls on the curve for TXP or any other film. He gives lots of exposure (down-rating the film and placing shadows higher), but we don't know how much of the "overexposure" actually improves tone reproduction vs just adding density.

When I watched the Barnbaum video about a millenium ago (haven't read the book), I got the impression he was talking about placing "important" shadows on Zone VI, which I understood as "really detailed" or "luminous" or whatever and which makes sense to me for landscapes, etc. If Barnbaum really thinks Zone III is somehow unusable, then that's just plain wrong... Trying to squeeze all the scene in between Zones IV and VIII just yields a flat, dense neg... Since his photographs are impressive, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt at this point. At least he's not underdeveloping, and overexposing isn't hurting things much!

In any case, I'll say again, a shadow is not a shadow and one simply places a chosen low value or values where they want it to turn out in the final print, be it Zone I, III or V. There is no "place the shadow in Zone XXX" rule; it depends on visualization. How much "extra" exposure above what is optimum that placement gives depends on how we have tested our materials (or not) and what we want from the process. How a shadow placement fits on the characteristic curve of any particular film is even more of a refinement. We are way into "nuance territory" for most beginners in the Zone System by this point. Most beginners are content with printable negatives and a basic grasp of the workings of the photographic process.

Doremus

[BetterSense]

http://www.fotoimport.no/images/film...00-Tmax-7m.jpg

The blue reference line covers 7 stops of density that generally "fits" onto silver gelatin paper. If you believe this result, you may conclude that one could overexpose TMY by 6-7 stops with minimal tonal changes except oodles of recoverable shadow detail. It should be noted that the authors opted to stop measuring density at 2.5. We can see that the film is not even shouldering at 2.5, so we have to speculate how much additional latitude there is beyond the graph.

[djdister]

... a shadow is not a shadow...

Absolutely right. Not all shadows are equal. For example, do you think a white tree in a shadow should be rendered the same as a dark gray tree in the same shadow? As an umbrella term, "shadow" is ridiculous. The rendering of objects that are not in direct sun (in "the shadow") should not be lumped into one bucket. What if 90% of your shot is in a shadow area - you wouldn't treat that as one zone, would you?

[Michael R]

Attached is an additional curve for TMY-2 if it helps. This one is in XTOL, which usually produces slightly lower extreme highlight contrast than D-76. Note this is not representative of TXP.