This shooter’s guide is going to use terminology directed toward simplifying your understanding of the concepts presented in this guide.
First and most important is the definition of a shooter. “Shooter” is a colloquial term that applies to a photographer who has complete control over the image capture process. Using the “lingo”, a photographer has lower status than a shooter, whereas photographer describes what you do, shooter describes that you do it exceptionally well. Traditionally applied to film capture, the term also applies to the digital practitioner. Irving Penn and Ansel Adams examples of film shooters. Chris Zsarnay, Richard Salas, Gary Steadman, and Robert Capalbo are good examples of digital shooters. Since they are MegaVision users, understand the complete process of digital capture, and will answer questions if you ask, they are excellent resources. Forward questions to your MegaVision tech support specialist for submission of questions to these shooters. Response time may be subject to scheduled deadlines as these people are working pros.
Zones. We will use zones as the description of a reflectance. Do not be alarmed because you’re heard it impossible to understand. There are only ten zones and they are much easier to understand than 256 levels. Besides the 10 zones can be easily translated to the 0-100 ink density scale that printers use. See the Digital Zone System document.
Place and Fall. Any exposure that you use places a specific scene reflectance as a specific density. Usually an incident meter places the middle of the film’s scale in the middle. When we make that exposure we try to make one of the reflectances expose exactly where we want it to land. All other scene reflectances will vary in brightness in relation to the placed reflectance. When you shoot film the only way to change a reflectance’s relationship to the placed reflectance is with development or with lighting. If you’re shooting color film you can’t change the development unless you test filter the development change because you’ll change the color balance. So you’re stuck with lighting as the main vehicle for changing relationships with the placed reflectance.
Reflectance. Anything that reflects light and can be measured can be labeled a reflectance.
Render. To represent in an artistic form. The way it should look.
Transition-of-tone. The progression of tones from a lower density to another, higher density. Our concern here is to provide enough contrast in the transition that it reproduces as you predict. You’ll need more contrast when crafting transition of tone for a low valued reflectance as opposed to a high valued reflectance.
Outline. Same as Silhouette or knockout or dropout. Shoot a product with the intention of removing the background and foreground by drawing a very accurate path around the product, selecting everything outside the path and deleting everything outside the path. New to digital capture is software that helps in the process of selecting everything outside the product path.
Luminance. This describes the density information of any given reflectance, separate from any color information that reflectance might also have. This information is expressed separately from the color information because it allows the adjustment of the density of the color without making changes to the color of the reflectance. We are also able to make changes to the color of the reflectance without changing the density of the color.
Chrominance. This describes the color information of a given reflectance, separate from any density information that reflectance might also have. This information is expressed separately from the luminance information because it allows the adjustment of the chrominance without making changes to the luminance (density) of the reflectance. We are also able to make changes to the luminance of the reflectance without changing the chrominance of the reflectance.
Threshold. This describes the point where density begins to visually separate tones. On continuous tone negative films, this threshold is just above zero exposure (black), it’s where the film can separate tone above the filmbase density+the development fog density. On a printing press this threshold of just perceivable density occurs at white (like continuous tone reversal films), density builds from no ink to a percentage the press can reliably and accurately render a minimum dot.
Gamut. A complete range, applied here to colors. This includes all colors within a colorspace or a target’s ability to render colors.