Black and white photographs in Soft and Hard Light. To capture the mood of a softly lit scene or to present the dramatic contrast of hard light and deep shadows, a black and white photographer often produces a black and white picture with a severely limited tonal range. In the above black and white picture of a lone priest on a fog-shrouded village street near Rome, black and white photographer Michael Semak ignored the upper and lower zones of the gray scale and concentrated on the middle zones-from 4 to 7. For the harshly lit black and white picture of a man on New York City's Staten Island ferry, shown on the opposite page black and white photographer Neal Slavin omitted almost all the middle zones and employed mainly the extremes 0 and 8 and 9. In each instance, the black and white photographer deliberately sacrificed detail to get the desired effect. In the black and white picture of the village street, the trees, except for the one in the foreground, are only ghostly shadows. There is slightly more detail in the ferry black and white picture but the wall is completely black and nothing can be seen outside the windows. Both black and white photographers could have included more zones of the gray scale, and still achieved almost the same effects by eliminating unwanted zones during the black and white printing process. However, when the desired result is clearly seen, it is usually best conveyed if it is registered in the black and white negative. Semak simply measured the light reflected by the fog, knowing it would indicate an exposure too small to record the darker zones in the scene; in this way he produced what would normally be considered an underexposed black and white negative. Slavin also elected to make a deliberately underexposed black and white negative, basing his exposure on the brightest zone, the light from the window. The long experience of the two black and white photographers enabled them to visualize the black and white negatives such underexposure would create, and in both instances the results are excellent. Seeking limited tonal range The exposure was 1/125 second at on ASA 400 Tri-X, using a Leica M2. Because he wanted an underexposed black and white negative, Michael Semak exposed for the average of all light reflected by the scene rather than for a dark object, recording the luminous fog as medium gray zones 6 and 7. Using a Pentax black and white camera loaded with ASA 125 Ilford FP4 black and white film, he made the exposure 1/125 second at t/5.6. Adding Tones by Adding Light - Both of the above black and white photographs were taken with a Linhof 4 x 5 black and white camera loaded with Tri-X black and white film, which the black and white photographer deliberately overexposed slightly. Even so, the dark areas in the black and white picture at left remain featureless. To get detail on the shadowed side of the subject's face, a white cardboard reflector was placed to the left and slightly in front of him. Under certain lighting conditions, a reflector or additional lighting is needed to broaden the tonal range and add detail. In the portrait above at left, for example, the highlighted half of the face is properly exposed but the other half is so dark-zone 2-that most of the detail is lost. Through the use of a white cardboard reflector illumination is supplied to the darker area, bringing it into the middle zones so that a considerable amount of detail appears.