# Zone System in regards to exposing for Skin Tones



## apathesia (Oct 31, 2010)

Hey, I just wanted to clarify something I'm a little confused about, and haven't been able to find an answer for yet. From what I've been led to believe, the reflected light meter in my Ricoh XR-2000 exposes for middle grey. So, and correct me if I'm wrong, if I was to fill the frame with a uniform tone, it would tell me the shutter speed to render that tone as middle grey in my exposure, right? That's the first part of my question.

The second is that, reading a little about Adams' zone system, it mentions that caucasian skin would be placed on zone 6, and middle grey on zone 5. I know it's more of guide than anything, but if I wanted to correctly expose for a Caucasian skin tone, would that mean I would meter it, then increase exposure by 1 stop?

Sorry if anything I'm asking sounds beginnerish, I'm just trying to get my head around exposure, and answers to these questions would clear a bunch of stuff up. Feel free to correct me if I f***ed something up


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## apathesia (Oct 31, 2010)

I should mention that I'm a beginner, and I realise I could probably take an acceptable photo in most situations just by going off what the meter says to do, however I'm interested very much in the technical side of photography (colour photography at the present) and don't just want to 'make do' or anything like that


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## ann (Oct 31, 2010)

correct; however, based on the tone of skin it might be 1/2 stop, think very pale skin vs. olive.


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## pgriz (Oct 31, 2010)

What Ann said. I&#8217;m also thinking that if you metered the incident light, you&#8217;d not have to concern yourself that much with the relative tonalities, except if the dynamic range of the scene exceeds the ability of your recording medium. Then you&#8217;d need to bias your exposure to get the wanted detail either in the dark or light parts of the scene. It is in the latter application that I find the Zone system's placement of tones to be helpful.


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## Helen B (Oct 31, 2010)

As Ann says, skin tone is not consistent, so the meter adjustment can vary. The skin tone of your own palm doesn't vary much, and you can find the appropriate meter adjustment - probably about half a stop. If used properly this gives you the equivalent of an incident meter in your camera.

Best,
Helen


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## pgriz (Oct 31, 2010)

Helen, thank you for that little bit of inspiration.  I just testing metering my palm with the camera, and compared it to the reading of my incident light meter, and the two readings were virtually identical.  So... if I'm too lazy to get the meter out, I can just meter my palm (which I usually remember to bring with me...:er.  Ii's a factoid, but a potentially useful one.


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## ann (Oct 31, 2010)

remember your hand has to be in the same light as the image to be taken or the results will not be the same.

and at the risk of sounding rude, lazy is not a factor for good photography especially with metering.


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## pgriz (Oct 31, 2010)

ann said:


> remember your hand has to be in the same light as the image to be taken or the results will not be the same.
> 
> and at the risk of sounding rude, lazy is not a factor for good photography especially with metering.


 
Hi Ann!  No, you're not rude, just truthful.  For some reason (scratching head, looking up into the distance), when I'm lazy my photos never seem to be very good.  When I work at it, the keeper rate goes up dramatically.  Who woulda thunk?


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## ann (Oct 31, 2010)

radically thought, working


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## rocdoc (Oct 31, 2010)

I think Adams himself emphasized that this is supposed to be a flexible guide. And if you place sample of color from several random caucasian people you'll be amazed at the wide range of tones (the same probably goes for other races). In fact, someone did a fun experiment a while back and showed that if you take an isolate patch of skin color off a neutral photo from several folks of different races, you sometimes find that the color of the skin of an African American is lighter than the one from a caucasian!


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## apathesia (Oct 31, 2010)

apathesia said:


> Hey, I just wanted to clarify something I'm a little confused about, and haven't been able to find an answer for yet. From what I've been led to believe, the reflected light meter in my Ricoh XR-2000 exposes for middle grey. So, and correct me if I'm wrong, if I was to fill the frame with a uniform tone, it would tell me the shutter speed to render that tone as middle grey in my exposure, right? That's the first part of my question.



Thanks for answering the second part of my question, I was just wondering if I could get some clarification on the first, above.


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## ann (Nov 1, 2010)

correct.  test if for yourself. take a white card, a black card and then grey and see what happens.


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## apathesia (Nov 1, 2010)

alrighty, thanks a whole bunch


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