True, but it needs to be the right work. Please don't take this as a personal attack because I don't know you at all, but I find that many adherents to the Zone System have essentially fallen for the 'One True Path' fallacy. The Zone System is one way of getting printable negatives but there are plenty of others which produce equally usable results. If all other things are equal, the negatives of person X are not better than those of person Y, simply because person X used the Zone System and person Y didn't; and nor are they likely to be, provided person Y is using a valid and consistent method. It's a variation of the same fallacy which says that 'all other things being equal, my photos are better than yours because I'm using a Leica and you're using a Zorki'.
You're right that there are different ways to get perfect exposure. An incident light meter, used correctly, also works well, though its readings require some interpretation when used for negative film since it is a highlight-biased system (which is perfect for slide film or digital).
What most people do is use the built in meter in their camera, which is usually one that averages brightness of the whole scene. The problem is, that's basically a guess. If the whole scene or nearly all is the same tone, you can do that and add a couple stops for a white scene or subtract a couple for a very dark one, but most real-world scenes aren't that easy. Its just dumb luck that anyone gets a perfect exposure that way and though most people get 'usable' results, that's not good enough for me.
I shoot stuff that isn't running away, I have time to meter carefully with a spotmeter for my black and white work. I use an incident for my slides or digital work. Some people claim that putting so much effort into it isn't creative somehow. I heard that a lot from my classmates in college. It was just a defense from them because they did crap work, and instead of doing it right, they spouted that bull**** about creativity. You see that kind of laziness A LOT in art schools. A lot of kids think art school is some big fun party where you smoke lots of weed and don't have to work at anything while mom & dad pay for it all.
I went to school to learn to do photography the right way because I already had an idea of what I wanted to do with it, even at a young age. I work hard because that's what works for the kind of images I want to make. I preach that to others because people ask me all the time how I get the beautiful images that I make. I tell them how to do it, in detail. Some photographers I have met were dicks about that, they treated technical knowledge like some deep dark secret. To me, it frees me to be creative because I don't have to worry about the technical aspects...I know that stuff will be perfect, so I can concentrate on the image. I don't have a problem sharing my knowledge; just because I teach someone to expose and develop film precisely dosn't mean they're going to copy my style...they'll have their own vision and they'll have the freedom to make it work.
Sure, there are other ways that do work. There are also a lot of ways people on the internet push that are worthless. I tell people how I do it when they ask, but a lot of people tell me its not worth the effort.
😛 Problem is all the methods I know of that do work consistently, perfectly, every time, no exceptions, all require thought and work. Some ways work most of the time, but I have found it much better to do it right and get the results I want the first time. Some things are gone when you go back to reshoot if you screw up!
I am not offended by what you wrote, and hope I didn't offend you either, Ade. I am just explaining why I feel the way I do about my working methods.
