Part I – “Film has curves too!”
One of my most beloved cameras is this Wisner 8x10 Technical Field.
As one can imagine, taking photos on the streets of Manhattan with this piece of functional furniture attracts a fair amount of attention. In particular, people most often approach me to talk about digital cameras. I will politely converse with them despite the fact my inner voice is wondering “what about this camera makes you think I want to talk about digital cameras?!”
One conversation that stands out to me was with a gentleman who felt it necessary to explain to me how easier digital photography was because he could adjust the image tonality using the curves tool in Photoshop. I remember at one point he said something along the lines of, “That’s the easy thing about digital, it has curves. Film doesn’t have curves.” Despite the vacuous assumption on his part I give this stranger a lot of credit for patiently listening to me explain how sensitometry curves are derived and that you can chart them for any photographic process; digital or analog. It never occurred to him that this applied science was over one hundred years old. Then again, this type of information gets lost of the mists of time. The work in the late 19th century by Ferdinand Hurter and Vero C. Driffield to establish the sensitometry of the photographic medium meant that for decades the characteristic curves of a film used to be called HD or H&D Curves in their honor. Post-war this nomenclature fell out of favor for the more generic Sensitometric or Characteristic curve label.
From the Royal Photographic Societies' "A Memorial Volume Containing an Account of the The Photographic Researches of Ferdinand Hurter and Vero C. Driffield." Printed in 1920, scanned from microfiche, and corrected using the curves tool in Photoshop.
Granted, adjustments to a digital image through the curve tool in Photoshop are simple to perform and seen immediately. However, what I had to clarify was that I knew my curves from rigorous sensitometric testing of my print paper and film. It’s not that my process lacked curves, but that I already knew what they would look like and therefore how my image would appear. What remained for me was to make the correct exposure and perform the correct development. I posed the question to him, “What do you think is better; having limited control of the image in the capture and having to alter it later in post or having complete control and understanding of the process from beginning to end?” There is no singularly true answer to this question but it did get him to leave me alone so I could concentrate on my work.
My fascination with encounters like the one above are not because I want to demean an amateur photographer’s lack of knowledge about the medium. I collect them because they paint a picture of the misunderstandings about photography brought about by a confluence of deceptive advertising by manufacturers, books on photography that lack sufficient technical editing, poor or incomplete advise on forums, and blog writers who are sleepwalking through proper research on the topic they’ve decided to expound upon. A good friend of mine calls this world “digital fan-fiction” because it propagates the myth of technological solutionism at the expense of the photographer’s own understanding about his medium. We are our own worst enemies.
I’m not suggesting that Zone System is officially dead. The title of this blog series is a personal joke about how people are quick to proclaim something is “dead” in the swift current of technological change. (Check out The Tragic Death of Practically Everything.) I’m justifying the title because it is the language and tone used in our lives today because it screams for attention. Now that I have yours I would like provide in the next few weeks a brief history of photographic sensitometry, how it is used with analog materials and the benefits it confers upon the photographer. I think we should look at the modern claims about the relevancy of Zone System to digital, and whether the Digital Zone System explanations that exist are accurate to the science. Finally, I hope to make a compelling case that the updating of sensitometry and Zone System information for digital production and post-production is sorely needed at this point.