Up to this point in The Negative, Adams has been building a very specific kind of discipline.
- Chapter 1: visualization and values
- Chapter 2: light and film (the camera records luminance, not meaning)
- Chapter 3: exposure is a decision
- Chapter 4: the Zone System gives you a language for placement and control
Chapter 5 is where he hands you two more tools that work at the moment of exposure: filters and pre-exposure.
They’re very different techniques, but they share one purpose: they let you shape the negative’s value structure before development, before printing, before “fix it later” becomes your personality.
Filters: localized contrast control, not an “effect”
Adams treats filters as a way to alter the value relationships between different colours in a black-and-white photograph.
That’s the key: a filter isn’t a gimmick. It’s a deliberate decision about separation.
A filter:
- lightens its own colour
- darkens the complementary colour
- reshapes how the scene’s colours translate into values
So a yellow/orange/red filter can deepen a blue sky and add separation to clouds. A green filter can lift foliage (sometimes less than you expect). A blue filter can do the opposite and often creates a colder, flatter rendering.
The idea is simple: the world is full of colours that can collapse into the same gray. Filters give you a lever to prevent that collapse.
The rule Adams pushes: start conservative, learn by comparison
He recommends using filters conservatively at first and learning their effects by making multiple exposures of the same subject with different filters. Not because he loves wasting film, but because he wants you to build a mental library:
- what a #8 yellow does to daylight shadows
- what a red filter does to haze
- how foliage shifts under different filtration
- how skin can change (and sometimes look “wrong”)
The broader point is pure Adams: you can’t visualize what you haven’t practiced.
Light color matters more than most people think
Chapter 5 makes an important point that still holds in 2026: Filter effects depend on the colour of the incident light, not just the subject.
Shadows lit by open blue sky are bluer than sunlit areas. Early and late sunlight is warmer. High altitude blue sky is intense. Haze and clouds shift everything.
Translation: if you treat filter factors and filter effects as fixed, you’ll be surprised a lot.
Adams is telling you to stop being surprised.
Film response matters too
He also reminds you that filtration only works if the film (or the capture medium) is sensitive to the light you’re trying to transmit.
- Orthochromatic film doesn’t see red the same way panchromatic film does
- Blue-sensitive emulsions have their own limitations
- Infrared film needs filtration just to behave predictably
Even if you’re working digitally now, the principle remains: you can’t separate what your medium can’t see.
“Other filters” that aren’t about drama
Adams spends time on practical filters that are about fidelity and control:
- UV/skylight filtration to reduce atmospheric haze effects (and, in general, to keep the capture clean)
- Neutral density filtration to reduce exposure uniformly when you need longer shutter speeds or to hold your aperture choice steady
This is where his mindset shows again: filters aren’t only for “look.” They’re often for execution.
The polarizer: not a contrast filter, but a value weapon
Adams treats the polarizer as its own category because it changes values by controlling polarization—glare and reflections.
It can:
- reduce reflections from water, glass, wet pavement, shiny leaves
- reveal what’s underneath reflective surfaces
- deepen skies (and in colour work, it’s often the only honest way to do it)
- increase perceived saturation in colour by removing glare you didn’t even notice
But he also gives a warning that’s more aesthetic than technical:
Sometimes glare and specular highlights are the life of the scene. Remove them completely, and things can look dead, waxy, or flat.
This is Adams teaching taste, not technique. Use the tool, but don’t erase the subject’s character.
He also makes a practical note photographers still get wrong: the polarizer’s exposure factor is essentially constant. The visual effect changes as you rotate it, but the light loss you must compensate for doesn’t “scale up” with the amount of polarization you’re seeing.
Combining filters: don’t stack your way into confusion
He’s blunt here: stacking filters rarely creates a magical “more.” Usually, you just get the strongest filter’s effect plus extra flare and extra light loss.
The big exception is stacking a contrast filter with a polarizer or a neutral density filter. And when you do that, the exposure factors multiply.
Again: Adams is trying to eliminate sloppy thinking.
Pre-exposure: raising the floor without blowing the ceiling
Then the chapter pivots hard, and it becomes one of my favourite concepts in the whole book.
Pre-exposure is a way of reinforcing shadow detail in high-contrast scenes without wrecking everything else.
Normally, if a scene is too contrasty, you contract development to hold the highlights. But that can reduce separation where you don’t want it reduced—especially in lower values.
Pre-exposure gives you another option:
- You give the film a controlled, uniform “first exposure” placed very low on the Zone scale
- Then you make the normal exposure of the subject
- The pre-exposure brings the negative closer to threshold, so very small additional exposures (deep shadows) will actually register detail
The key is proportionality: adding a little exposure matters a lot down near the bottom, and barely matters at the top. That’s why pre-exposure improves shadow detail while leaving midtones and highlights largely untouched.
The warning: it’s brilliant for small shadows, risky for big ones
Adams is careful here. If your deep shadows are small and textured, pre-exposure can be a gift.
But if the image contains large areas of deep, smooth shadow, pre-exposure can create a kind of veiling or fog—false tonality where the shadow should feel solid.
So this isn’t a “do it always” technique. It’s a surgical technique.
The practical method is very Adams: build a repeatable device
He describes using a diffusing device to create a uniform luminance, metering it properly, placing it on the intended low zone (often Zone II), then making the pre-exposure—followed by the normal exposure.
He’s obsessive about one thing: consistency.
If you can’t repeat it, you can’t trust it. If you can’t trust it, you can’t visualize it.
2026 translation: pre-exposure is controlled shadow insurance
In digital terms, you can think of pre-exposure as a very specific philosophy:
- Don’t “lift shadows” later as rescue.
- Give the shadows more usable information at capture, in a controlled way, without sacrificing everything else.
We accomplish that now with different tools—exposure bias, careful histogram discipline, fill light, bracketing, blending, sensor profiles—but the intent is the same:
Protect the values that matter before you get to the edit.
My 2026 takeaway
Chapter 5 is Adams offering two honest ways to shape the negative at the moment it’s created:
- Filters let you decide how colors translate into values, so separation is intentional instead of accidental
- Pre-exposure lets you lift the deepest shadows without flattening the whole print, when the scene’s contrast is simply too long-scale for “normal” to behave
It’s a chapter about craft maturity.
- Not more gear.
- More control.
- More clarity about what you’re trying to say.
Next up: Chapter 6 — Natural Light Photography.