This is the 2nd book in Ansel Adams photography series. I really cant stress enough the importance of reading all 3 of these books and reading them in their proper order. Ansel talks about a lot of techniques and many of these techniques build upon previous knowledge. If your serious enough about photography to have an interest in these books then you should want to do it right and doing it right is buying all 3 books and reading them in order.

The negative is imo the most important book in the series and this is because this book really teaches you the ins and outs of the Zone System, which in case your unaware is the photographic technique for determining optimal film exposure and development. On top of that its a pre-visualization tool that really makes you understand how a scene is translated into a photographic image. There is no better system in photography period. If you take the time to learn the zone system from top to bottom, I guarantee you will become a photographer who is in complete control of the photographic techniques required to make an amazing final print. If you want to become a master or just a great photographer, there is no better place to start than learning the zone system.

As I have said in my reviews of the other books in this series, this is not a series for a beginner and this book in particular will be extremely difficult for a beginner to stomach. While this is probably the best written technical book in all of photography, some of it can still be incredibly difficult for beginners to grasp. If your a beginner I recommend reading a beginner photography book. One that will teach you the basics. Once you have a solid foundation of the basics, then start on this series.

I wont bother going into any more detail in regards to what this book teaches. That would take too much time and it would make this review way too long. As the name of the book clearly states, this book's focus is on the negative and as I am sure your aware the neg is the shot. If you screw up the neg, chances are nothing you can do will fix the image. This book will teach you how to get that perfect neg each and every time regardless of conditions.

The bottom line - This is hands down the best 3 book series on photography ever made. If you are serious about photography and want to learn how to master shooting and printing in black and white then look no further.

I decided to buy this book after I gave a try to Ricardo Aronovich's "Exponer una historia", a book that makes a farily simple explanation of the Zone system for cinematographers. And I decided to do so because, for some reason, it's simplicity makes it really hard to understand, since it lacks a lot of the necessary math you'll need to understand the effect of light on film. Although much of the information in this volume doesn't cover digital technologies, the basic principles actually apply to any format. I'd suggest it though to serious students only.

The core of this book is probably the zone system. Before reading the book, I had heard many comments on how complicated and inpractical this system is. However, I found this system to be a extremely reliable, easily understood and an applicable system to work with. It is IMO the best system to work with. There are obviously many contents about shooting in films. Ansel passed away in 1984. I dont think you can expect him to write about digital age even if he could predict the rise of digital camera. Still, the zone system and many insights are extremely helpful even for digital photography. I am also surprised on how well the book is written with many detail samples and how the zone system can be applied to these samples. This is a must have for anyone who wants to make better exposures.
With the zone system, you will know exactly how bright/contrast your photo should turn out. You will know which part of your picture will be underexposed, which part of your picture will be overexposed even before you take the picture because you can predict which zone each individual part of the picture will fall into with just a few metering and calculation. In turn, you can control exactly how your picture should turn out, and what exposure will get you the best photo. Some people may complain that it requires too much metering. Actually, you only need to meter the most important parts (usually the brightest and the darkest part, or your favorite part) of the photo in order to make sure they appear fine in your picture. Taking a few meter will save you a lot of time from going back to PS your pictures. Ansel is a genius to come up with this system!

If you are interested in photography and in making excellent photographs whether digital or traditional film its important to read Ansel Adams. He did the photography and the development of film and the printing and his photographs of the landscape especially known for photographing Yosemite are exquisitely perfect in black and white. In this book that is part of a series of 3 he gave us everything we need to make great photographs. Why would someone who is a digital photographer read this book? Its to understand the basics the foundation of photography. This book is The Negative and in digital photography what you get is the negative and the print together and you want to understand what you have and what you can do make that photograph or that negative in black and white photography what you want it to be what you visualized when you saw the image in real life.
The book The Negative is sometimes difficult to follow cause he was truly a Master and most of us are not so just keep reading to get whats of value to you as a reader and a photographer
This book The Negative is part of a three book series includes
The Camera
Basic Techniques of Photography that has revised edition from his student John Schaeffer
Read all these books if you are committed to excellence in your photography
JG

Concisely written in Adams' own scholarly style, "The Negative" is a valuable resource for photographers learning the foundation of technically correct (as opposed to generally good) base exposure in a variety of scenes, both pedestrian and those that are more conflicting. One must, however, consider that more than 4 decades have passed since the techniques were founded and the technology described can be viewed, in many cases, with a quaint tug at nostalgia. Today's evaluative and matrix metering systems, programmed along the Zone System, do a remarkable job where once exposure was tedious and error prone, and this is where learning the Zone System to competently handle difficult scenes is a useful addition to a photographer's "book of tricks". But despite the clarity of explanation and steps, Adams' Zone System remains a complex, intertwining system to understand (theory) and apply (field application); it never was and never will be a five-minute task. For B&W fine art photographers, "The Negative" holds a timeless reference quality with many techniques remaining the solid benchmarks for fine art production. In summary, a tremendously good read and a most valuable addition to any learned photographer's library.

The Negative (Ansel Adams Photography, Book 2)