The Zone System is the simplest and best method yet devised for planning an exposure. Created by Ansel Adams and expounded by Minor White and others, it is more than just a shirt-sleeve approach to sensitometry; it is an elegant method of integrating all the decisions and techniques of exposure control. …
The zone system was invented by Ansel Adams, one of the most famous photographers ever. He was a master of technique, and had an eye for light that few are blessed with. His photographs were the result of a happy combination of comprehensive technique and the knack of taking a picture when the light was at its best. A distinguishing feature of his black and white photographs is how light and dark areas play off each other in an instantly appealing manner.
Culturegrid is a huge index of cultural assets in the UK (books, photographs, videos, locations…), and has a search API. At the moment it doesn’t return the large images for the URLs it indexes. This adds that feature.
An open-source guide to working with light by Dan Nguyen
The Bastards Book of Photography is a visual guide for learning your camera’s manual controls in order to make beautiful photographs. No flash or other fancy equipment required.
Although far more people could now take photographs, for most of the first half of the twentieth century photography really meant pictures in black and white. Everyone now expects to have colour prints from their holiday a few hours after returning home, but 60 years ago a skilled photographer would take several days, at great expense, to get one colour image on to paper. Reaching today’s position called for tremendous research – firstly to establish the best principle on which to base a system of colour photography, and secondly (even more difficult) how to put it into practice so that it was simple, inexpensive and gave high quality results. Hundreds of systems for ‘natural colour photography’ were put forward, often by fakers and fraudsters. Fortunes were lost trying to launch processes which only partly overcame problems and contained some fatal flaw. …