I’ve been having a bit of an ‘analog’ renaissance lately, wandering around with my old Minolta, taking her back to the mountains she loved to explore with me, introducing her to new views and letting her work her alchemical magic once more. Back home, she’ll watch as I develop the B&W film and as I hang up the negatives to dry I can hear her calling ‘show me, show me!’, or so I fancy. Ah the romance of film photography.

With 36 exposures instead of 36 million tending towards infinite, mechanical kit tends to focus your attention on getting the best out of a situation, especially when you’re up a mountain and the light is changing fast. How best to use your machinery to capture your vision? In them ‘olden days’ of yore it was Ansel Adam’s zone system for sheet film. Premix with a drop of pre-visualisation, stir well with altered development and finish off with a healthy dose of dodging and burning in the darkroom.

Fast forward twenty odd years to when I was planning my recent ’non mechanical’ photography exhibition, it became clear I needed a ‘reproducible fullfilment channel’. WTF! That was my reaction too when the term popped into my head! Photography is an art form. It has subjective inputs (your creative vision) and subjective outputs (how your vision has been realised in hard format, i.e. print). I can flap around all I like saying I’m an ‘artiste’ but at the end of the day, I need a way to mix my creativity with ‘something’ to produce prints that people want to buy. I need something in the middle, between previsualisation and finished print, that I can use reliably, every time. It’s the bit in the middle this book deals with.

Robert Fisher’s journey into the Digital Zone System (DZS) begins with an overview of Ansel Adam’s philosophy and technique for the original ‘analog’ zone system. If you want to know how Ansel worked in depth, read The Negative. Robert then goes on to talk about basic stuff like colour spaces and whether to use JPEG or RAW and how your camera deals with exposure (hint, it sees everything as grey). What he’s doing in the early chapters is helping you build a workflow to support your use of the DZS. You can’t just fire up the old gal, batter the shutter a few dozen times and watch those JPEGs fly through the ether to social media acclaim. You need to understand the relationship between light and colour, aka luminosity and for that you need RAW.

Once you’ve grasped the basics of how your tool works, i.e. the thing that captures your vision (you do have a vision don’t you? excellent!), the book moves on to describe in good detail the tools of the DZS craftsman. Fortunately these aren’t esoteric stone carving implements but partly Lightroom and mostly Photoshop.

I know, I know, lots of people avoid Photoshop like the plague, mostly because of garish HDR or editing techniques that produce stuff that just doesn’t look as if it ever existed. There’s a photographer not far from me who proudly proclaims on the board outside their studio, ‘images not photo-shopped’ but truth be told, you need it or at least something similar in terms of pixel level manipulation. If you decide to eschew computer work entirely, you’re still relying on a computer running sophisticated software to generate your images.

Cameras these days aren’t really cameras in the traditional sense. Back when all photographers had beards (even the ladies), the camera was just a way to excite your silver nitrate population by giving them presents of visible spectrum photons. It was up to you how you calmed them down enough to produce a print you were happy with. Today, ‘cameras’ are just computers with lenses. The processing engine does all that work for you, if you shoot in JPEG. The DZS is a way to partially grow back one’s metaphorical beard, shovel lots of ‘bits’ into your creative oven, turn it up to Zone Mark 10 and bake a classic. Time and again.

Having described the Photoshop tools required for the DZS (not many thank goodness) the book then ushers us into the hushed silence of the creative cathedral where we will take those bits from the camera and turn them into our vision. The cool stone walls of this vast space tower above us. Light streams from windows turreted high in the vaulted roof. We touch the columns that support generations of photographic vision. This is where all those plugins, those applications, techniques, gurus and madmen draw their strength. This is where light itself is turned to your own architecture. This is where your style is born.

But first, back to our tools and Robert takes us through creating a luminosity layer in our image, to extract the light information on which we’ll work. Then we’re shown how to create the actual zone system channels and masks. It’s tedious work but only needs to be done once and if the DZS clicks for you, it’ll replace even more tedious masking, brushing, dodging and burning every time you open a new image. Robert does include a link to actions he’s created that you can use to create the zone system channels but I preferred to follow the instructions, commit them to memory and create my own and save in my own Gabbro actions collection. A nice touch is being able to compare your own set of actions with Robert’s, just to check you can actually do it for yourself. From then on, it’s just a case of basic edits in Lightroom, opening in Photoshop and running the luminosity layer and zone system channels actions and you’re ready to start creating.

I liked the discussion on how to use the DZR as opposed to having to follow steps to produce exactly what the author produced in each image. Speaking about tonal relationships, colour contrasts etc is much more useful than the nornal “here’s how I did it in 150 easy steps” which seem to proliferate these days. The book ’teaches you how to fish’, if you know what I mean.

The meat of the book is in the creation of DZS layers, how to interpret the light values in your images and work on them with those layers, in order to reproducibly fulfill your channel (excuse the pun!). However there are a couple of bonus chapters at the end where we get to see how the author uses the DZS to work with HDR images and printing, with a good discussion on tone mapping and rendering intents. I thought the way the author described rendering intents prior to printing was clear, to the point and explained it in terms anyone can understand. If there was anything amiss with these two chapters it was the size of the images used to visually explain colour spaces and variations in HDR processing workflows. They were just too small for me to make any meaningful comparisons, however, in terms of a good grounding in using the DZS for HDR and printing the chapters were spot on.

At the end of the book is a nice summary of each chapter’s image, telling its story which added a very nice personal touch to the content. I thought this was a good idea and thoroughly enjoyed reading them.

All this banter is fine until it’s time to pay the ferryman. The proof of the pudding is in the eating as they say (do I have any more cliches?) and so, do I have anything to show for my investment in the book? I’ll say. The image at the top of the review is quite a common occurrence on Skye, the large-ish island that clings to the rugged north west coast of Scotland. It has the most rugged mountain range in the United Kingdom and faces the blast of Atlantic storms that hit these shores both summer and winter alike. Therefore we get a lot of rainbows. Having said that, they’re usually accompanied by black scowling skies and torrential rain. An exposure nightmare.

I normally use some mild HDR with 3 exposures to deal with these conditions but a few days ago, having read the book and practiced the workflow and tooling, I ran outside to capture this passing double rainbow using a single exposure. A little bit of ETTR (explained in the book), I imported the RAW image into Lightroom. Some basic lens corrections and exposure tweaking then into Photoshop and the luminosity and zone system actions. Following Robert’s advice on determining which parts of the image lie in which zones (the digital step wedge in Chapter One is great for this), I slowly learned how to ‘see’ in digital zones. The result surpassed what I thought I could do with the DZS and in half the time it would have taken to edit using traditional masking. I could isolate different areas of clouds, the rainbow, the loch, all based on tones, zones and vision. So I ate the pudding and it tasted very nice indeed and the DZS will now become a mainstay of my workflow, especially the B&W project I’m working on.

There are other ways of producing the effects detailed in this book, at the click of a button. But think on this. When your personal style as a creative photographer depends entirely on the availability of a particular piece of software, your coat is, to quote a famous Glaswegian philosopher, ‘on a shoogly peg’. I liked what I could do with Google Nik’s Silver Efex Pro for my digital B&W work but when Google abandoned the software, made it free and simply walked away from it, I began to wonder how long it would be before it no longer worked at all. As the versions of Lightroom/Photoshop march on, Nik will eventually fade in compatibility and disappear, taking your style with it. You can obviously buy new software but it won’t produce the same style, exactly, that Nik did and you’ll have another few months of tedium learning the new software, wondering who’ll take that one over and kill it. Much better to visit the same cathedral of light that Nik uses and learn to understand what it is your style does to those photons, so you can reproduce it time and again, as long as you have access to the luminance information in your previsualised images.

There was only one big-ish niggle I could find with the book (some say the lack of ‘150 easy steps to produce what I produced’ is another but I don’t agree) was some confusion when creating the density masks on p84. The text was confusing and I ended up way off course. So I emailed the author and to Robert’s credit he emailed me right back and explained. I saw where I’d gone wrong and was back on track in a jiffy. I thought that was a really nice thing to do.

You can view more of the author’s work on his website and if you buy the book from the following link, it’ll help me keep this pokey blog going and bring more insightful content to more creatives looking for insightful content. Thanks for reading this far and I hope you enjoyed the review as much as I enjoyed writing it.