In 1990, I had an opportunity to attend a Howard Bond (RIP) workshop at The Great Sand Dunes Monument in Colorado. I was photographing in B&W exclusively at that time, using Kodak TMax 100 4×5 sheet film. Carrying my 35lb backpack and tripod up the dunes was not an easy task, but once we got to the first plateau, other climbs were less difficult.
As the sun set towards the horizon, shadows and other less lit areas, as well as bright streaks, began to become prominent. The confluence of sand dunes led to a perfect illustration in nature of Ansel Adams’s Zone System. Manual metering and appropriate exposure and developing times were established. As Ansel once wrote: “The negative is the equivalent of the composer’s score and the print is the performance”!
