Photographs are informed by considered and intentional choices. These choices are suggested by a need or desire to secure a moment, an experience, a revelation, a curiosity, or a discovery on a digital sensor or on photographic analog film. The shutter release is not simply pressed and the photograph taken, but rather made, through a process of mental construction.

This is called visualization – interpreting the actual in front of the camera and translating it into a photographic language through the intentional use of aesthetic choices and considerations unique to the medium, including the tonal values of grayscale.

This visual thinking can happen regardless if you're looking through the camera viewfinder or a the smartphone screen or not. Your visualizing of the scene, the moment, further elaborates, refines and embellishes – from looking and the gathering of visual information to a careful study, analysis and organization of that information.

This attention to seeing and visualizing what to include in the frame, where to stand, what details to include as well as using the lighting circumstance to reveal and conceal will result in the making of photographs that are deliberate and intentional.

Robert Adams_Grayscale.jpg

© Robert Adams, Eucalyptus alley, Riverside, California, 1978

However, these formal considerations with image capture is just the beginning. There is the need to consider and translate the scene as a grayscale photographic image where the importance of tone and description will further articulate the visual sensation. These tonal and descriptive possibilities can be realized by understanding and utilizing the general tonal principles of the Zone System.

It is this range of descriptive possibilities that can be realized by better understanding the full tonal range of the Zone System that will further communicate the possibilities of visual engagement and pleasure (beauty) and the interpretive meanings suggested of a grayscale / black & white photograph.