Exercise 1.8: Zone system in practice

Demonstrate your awareness of the Zone System and your ability to take accurate light readings by producing three photos taken in relatively high dynamic range. 

It was nice to actively make use of the light metering exercises in TAOP course while undertaking this exercise. I found myself on a slightly chilly temperamental weatherise day sitting in Ogmore Castle with my family when I decided to make use of the dynamic range and take some pictures.

The sky was a mixture of blue skies and cloud and thought it a good opportunity to see what light readings would be produced in the lighter and darker areas of the scene.

The first shot was taken into the cloudy/overcast sky with a reading 1/400

Sky reading 1/400

For some reason, the image appears a lot lighter than in my photo editing software so i'm not quite sure what is going on with it as in 'Aperture' the foreground is a lot darker and all detail in this area is pretty much lost. Even in this image though, we don't really get much detail from the image, it's got a grey colour cast but the sky detail is great and we can see the cloud structure.

castle wall reading 1/125

This image focusses on the castle walls within the centre of the image at 1/125. We get a lot more detailing of the castle and the grass area hover the sky is blown out.

Tree reading 1/200

This final image then shows how we have kept to a more central meter reading between the highest and lowest readings and kept most of the detail from the castle but also gained back slightly some of the cloud detail, albeit not much. I always find this a huge factor when photographing scenes on an overcast day. Trying to keep detail so the sky doesn't blow out is challenging and unfortunately something that I almost always have to amend during processing.


Turning around I have a different scene, with blue sky with cloud and more greenery.

Clouds focus - reading 1/320

I focussed on the clouds again first and am surprised at how much detail has been kept from the foreground.  The blue sky gave a reading of 1/250 and the then there trees in the centre read at 1/200.

wall reading 1/160

The wall in the foreground gave a lower reading of 1/160, whilst the grass in the foreground was lowest at 1/125. Again, trying to find a mid point I decided the 1/200 reading would keep the most detail to both the sky and the foreground.

trees reading 1/200

Something I have been looking at purchasing more and more since starting this course are filters. I don't have any as yet but I have been looking into it increasingly as I think it would be a good addition to explore the difference it would make to my images.