I’m continuing this chapter-by-chapter walk through Ansel Adams’ trilogy—The Camera, The Negative, The Print—with the same promise I made at the start: translate the fundamentals into how we actually work now.
If you’re following along, here’s the on-ramp for book two:
- The Negative Starts Where The Camera Leaves Off (Introduction)
https://paul.macpherson.photography/fundamentals/the-negative-starts-where-the-camera-leaves-off-ansel-adams-introduction-2026-take/ - Visualization and Image Values (Chapter 1)
https://paul.macpherson.photography/fundamentals/visualization-and-image-values-chapter-1-ansel-adams-the-negative-reinterpreted-for-2026/
Now we’re at Chapter 2: Light and Film — and it’s Adams doing something essential: forcing us to stop assuming the camera sees what we see.
Because it doesn’t.
Light is physics first, “beauty” second
Adams starts at the root: light is electromagnetic radiation, and the visible spectrum is just a narrow band of it. We experience that band as colour—from violet through red—but film (and modern sensors) don’t politely stop at the edges of our perception. Ultraviolet and infrared exist whether we acknowledge them or not, and photographic materials can respond to them.
This is the first lesson of Chapter 2:
If you don’t understand what light is, you’ll keep being surprised by what the film (or sensor) does.
Incident light vs reflected light: why the subject matters
Then Adams draws a line that becomes the backbone of exposure control:
- Incident light is the light falling onto the subject.
- Reflected light is what the subject sends back toward the camera.
Both are “real,” but only one becomes the photograph.
Adams argues that incident readings can be useful, but they skip a crucial piece of information: reflectance—the inherent brightness of the subject itself. A white wall and a black jacket can be lit by the same incident light, yet they will not reflect the same amount of light to the camera. If you want creative control over values, you can’t ignore that.
His bias is clear (and it’s consistent with everything that comes later in The Negative):
Reflected-light evaluation is more informative—if you actually understand what you’re measuring.
Reflectance, luminance, and why the world doesn’t fit inside a print
Adams turns reflectance into something you can think with:
- Dark materials reflect very little light.
- Light materials reflect a lot.
- Most real scenes aren’t “uniform illumination,” because shadows and directional light multiply the range.
He builds the logic like this:
- Under perfectly even light, the darkest natural surfaces and the lightest natural surfaces already create a wide ratio.
- Add shadow, and the brightness range expands rapidly.
- Real outdoor scenes can blow past what a print can literally reproduce.
And this is where the chapter gets quietly profound:
Even when a print can’t match the world’s brightness ratios, it can still look convincing.
Because we don’t perceive brightness like a meter.
Your eye is a liar (a useful liar, but still a liar)
Adams explains the human advantage and the human problem in one go: our visual system adapts.
He describes a simple experiment—identical white papers placed at different distances from a light source. Physically, the farther papers are much darker. But perceptually, we can still recognize them as “white” depending on what we’re comparing them to and what we’ve adapted to.
This is the photographic trap:
- We know what something “is,” so we expect it to print that way.
- The film (or sensor) doesn’t know anything. It just records luminance.
So if your photograph doesn’t match what you “remember seeing,” it’s often because you weren’t seeing the luminance structure at all—you were seeing meaning and your brain was compensating.
Chapter 2 is Adams telling you: stop letting your brain auto-correct the scene. Learn to see what the camera will actually record.
Colour is not decoration — it’s value manipulation
This section is a 2026 gut-check for anyone who converts to black and white with a preset and calls it done.
Adams reminds us:
- “White” light is a mix of wavelengths.
- Different light sources have different spectral mixes (daylight vs tungsten is the classic example).
- Our eyes normalize that difference. Film does not.
Then he brings it back to values: colored surfaces reflect certain wavelengths more than others. That means two objects that feel similar in “brightness” to your eye can separate dramatically in a black-and-white photograph depending on the film’s sensitivity and the light source’s color.
And that leads directly to filters:
A yellow filter isn’t a vibe. It’s a decision.
It transmits some wavelengths and holds back others—changing the exposure of different subject colours and reshaping value relationships in the negative.
What film is made of (and why it matters to your expectations)
Adams gets mechanical here, but it’s not trivia. Film is basically:
- a base
- an emulsion of silver halide crystals in gelatin
- coatings to control curl, halation, and handling
Exposure creates an invisible latent image. Development turns that into metallic silver density. More exposure → more density. Less exposure → less density.
This is the bridge between Chapter 1 and everything coming next:
Values become density. Density becomes the print.
If you want control, you have to respect the chain.
Film speed: the number is a starting point, not a truth
Then Adams hits “speed” with the tone of someone who’s been burned.
He explains speed systems (ASA / DIN / ISO), and the practical meaning: doubling the speed number halves the exposure. That’s the math.
But his real warning is about the world:
- speed ratings are based on standardized conditions
- your workflow is not standardized
- film changes with age, heat, storage, and delay
- manufacturers change emulsions (sometimes quietly)
So he pushes the mature habit:
Test. Re-test. Trust your own process over the label.
In 2026 terms: it’s the same mindset as learning your camera’s real ISO behaviour, your highlight headroom, and your noise tolerance—because the spec sheet doesn’t know how you print, or how you grade, or what you consider “acceptable.”
Grain, sharpness, resolution: the tradeoffs you can’t escape
Adams treats grain like a cost you choose.
Higher speed usually means larger grain and reduced resolving power. Fine-grain usually means slower film and higher contrast. Development choices can alter perceived sharpness (acutance) and grain prominence, but you’re always working within the limits of the emulsion you chose.
And he reminds us of something photographers still confuse:
- Resolution is the ability to separate fine detail.
- Acutance is the crispness of edges (what we often feel as sharpness).
In modern digital terms, grain becomes noise, acutance becomes sharpening, and resolution becomes your capture pipeline (lens + sensor + technique). Different era, same tradeoffs.
Spectral sensitivity: what the film “sees” changes the photograph
Finally, Adams lays out the reality that makes black-and-white photography either frustrating or addictive:
Different films respond differently to different wavelengths.
Early emulsions were blue sensitive—which is why old landscapes often have blank white skies. Orthochromatic films respond to blue and green but not red. Panchromatic films respond across the visible spectrum (with their own biases).
The practical outcome is the part that matters:
Film sensitivity and filtration decide how colours translate into values.
That’s not a technical footnote. That’s the creative core.
My 2026 takeaway
Chapter 2 is Adams stripping away the comforting myth that photography is “what I saw.”
It’s not.
Photography is what the camera can record, shaped by what the film/sensor is sensitive to, shaped by what the subject reflects, shaped by how your eye lies to you, and shaped by the decisions you make to translate it.
This chapter is basically the foundation under the Zone System:
- understand light as measurement
- understand values as relationships
- understand the material’s response
- then control the result on purpose
Next up: Chapter 3 — The Zone System.