zone II

>
>For ME with MY paper and MY chemistry: Cyanotype loses the extremes.
>I fall from zone 3 (well detailed dark tones) into featureless dark
>very quickly. With in camera film, that is just a "fact of life"
>with MY materials. AA's zones 0,1 and 2 are really "incorrect" for
>ME and MY version of Cyanotype. Alt doesn't always "take away" from
>the AA descriptions, in platinum I get a wonderful extended set of
>closely placed high zones.
>
>Find ONE "thinking/testing/visual" version of the zone system and do
>the work. You will need to do it for each process / paper combo :-(
>

I think this is true. I learned the zone system when I was a
cyanotype "specialist," and I quickly started ignoring zone II as
irrelevant, perhaps for the reasons you say above, although
unconscious of those reasons.

Then when I started printing silver (Azo paper at first), it took me
a while to realize that I could have a darker zone than the textured
shadows in zone III and that my prints would look better if I did.
But it took me a long time to figure that out and to start metering
zone II and looking for it when previsualizing.

--shannon
Received on Sat Oct 1 08:07:20 2005