Vienna ~ a Digital Zone System Black and White adventure

We needed to "get out of Dodge" for a few days so my wife and I visited Vienna.

 

I wanted to post images of our wanderings in near real time.  To do that I'd need to rely on the in-camera jpg processor since there was no way I'd be taking computer while on vacation.  I wanted to be out having fun and not sitting around the apartment processing RAW images.

Further, I had in mind shooting a film simulation recipe in the "big camera" that has a nice Zeiss zoom and shoot black and white in the "small" camera that has Sigma fixed focal length lens.  Things got off to a good start, but it was a rather/shockingly/absurdly large effort to download and post both the color film simulations and anything that happened to catch my eye in black and white.  Soon I realized I was very much enjoying exploring the city in black and white and decided to post works only in this style. 

A photographer friend says  "Photography is like music. You need good instruments, good technique, and, above all, artistry. When a picture sings, you've got it right!".

 

Looking at the shear volume of images I was trying to share, I realized I was like that annoying kid with an artless kazoo marching around making all manner of noise. There was no peace.  There was no rest.  It was somewhat difficult to get it right! in camera, but there was no stopping me once I got rolling.

*snap*click*post*whee* goes the annoying kid with an ungovernable rude kazoo

After characterizing my Sony systems to adapt the old film Zone System of exposure (see St. Ansel, Brothers M.White and P.Davis, et al) for this trip I settled on the following process.

• Creative Style - Black and White
• Contrast -3
• Sharpness +1

• Expose -
• Meter = Spot
• Back-button AEL - Auto-Exposure Lock 
• +2.5EV bright highlights (for 80% of the images I took) 
• -2EV shadows (for photographing dark places - cathedral, tombs)
• +/-0.5EV bracket - 3 or 5 exposures

•  Technique -
• Light/Normal situations - 
• +2.5EV exposure compensation
• AEL the lightest area of a scene
• Recompose
• Release the shutter
• Let the lower tones render as they will 
• Dark situations -
• -2EV exposure compensation
• AEL area to be expressed as Zone 3
• Recompose
• Release the shutter 
• Let the lighter tones render as they will

• Digital Zone System details -
• Zone 9 is pure white (this is crucial: _not_ Zone 10 as defined for film)
• In fact, +3.7EV is the precise point where we go from luminescence value 247 (usable information in white) to 255 at +4EV (pure white) (edited 17 June 2025)
• Zones less than 3 often contain useful information (where film seldom ever did) 

 

What I ended up with were minimally three exposures per image with 3 or 5 jpgs to choose from and post while on the road and 3 or 5 RAW to work on at my leisure after I returned home.  I "copped out" by bracketing because I seldom had the time to carefully meter a scene.  So off went the kazoo sending photons of light in three or five different directions with the hope something would "stick."

In general I think the approach "works."  I've only worked a handful of RAW images after the fact.  What I would like to do differently next time is to use 0.3EV bracketing in place of the rather coarse 0.5EV steps.  And I would like to see if I can make the highlights "sparkle" a bit better, while retaining a sense of "richness" of tone that comes with B&W contrast set to -3.