place-and-fall relationships

Assuming that you came through the luminance range exercise you now have the skills necessary to determine luminance range. Let's do something with those skills.

Place-and-fall relationships are another very important aspect of actual Zone System exposures. This exercise will provide an opportunity to become familiar with the Place-and-Fall relationships of real-world exposures.

To solve these place-and-fall quiz challenge questions you must use all of the information which will be provided for the question. You will be given arbitrary values for shadow exposure, highlight exposure and a shadow placement. You will be asked to provide the highlight 'fall'.

Under normal use of the Zone System, you select your own values for shadow placement; that is one of the great strengths of the Zone System. However, for purposes of this exercise, the numbers although arbitrary in nature, are selected to make viable real-world examples of meter-reading, subject placement and other picture variables. The numbers are picked to work out 'nicely'

The questions at
this level of difficulty all assume 'Normal' film development.

There are 2 basic steps:

1. Use the techniques from the luminance range exercise to determine the luminance range for the subject.
2. Add the luminance range to the shadow placement. The result is where the highlight 'falls' on the greyscale.

Here is a sample quiz:

Shadow Meters:    F-5.6
Highlight Meters: F-32
Shadow Placement: Zone 2
Highlight fall: ???


First determine the luminance range
F1.4  f2  f2.8  f4  f5.6  f8  f11  f16  f22  f32  f45  f64  f90
                     0     1   2    3     4    5
                     S                         H
                  (Shadow)                (Highlight)
              This subject has a 5-stop luminance range.


Next add the luminance range to the shadow placement
       Shadow placement   2
        Luminance range + 5
--
Highlight falls on Zone   7



Here's what the exposure looks like
First look at shadow placement...
Zone0  Zone1  Zone2  Zone3  Zone4  Zone5  Zone6  Zone7  Zone8  Zone9  Zone10
                S
              shadow
             placement


then discover where the highlight falls:          
Zone0  Zone1  Zone2  Zone3  Zone4  Zone5  Zone6  Zone7  Zone8  Zone9  Zone10
                S                                  H
              shadow                            highlight
             placement                         falls here


           (dark gray with                    (lightest gray
           a suggestion of                     to have fully
              texture)                       detailed textures)

Ready? Great. This exercise should help a lot of stuff come home to you; we're starting to get a real sense of what the subject will look like. Click the button below to start working with place-and-fall exercises. Return to this page to look at the example above if you need to.