In the zone

I believe the vast majority of photographers use a version of Photoshop whether it is CS or Elements, so if your photo editor does not have the Levels palate or a histogram then you'll not know what I am on about.

Back in the days of steam cameras without built in light metres, a bunch of photographers got together and devised the Zone system and it worked a treat for photographers such as Ansel Adams and the like. Basically they looked at the range of tones from the blackest black, with no detail visible to the whitest white with no detail and divided this into 11 zones from 0 to X. Each zone was double the greyness of the preceding.
I'm not going to go into how to use the zone system, if you want to know then a great tutorial / podcast can be found on Jeff Curtoe's web site http://www.cameraposition.com/archives/69 and http://www.cameraposition.com/archives/79
However the zone system is still as important today as it was in the yesterdays, light meters can be fooled and we still need to think about stopping down when photographing bight subjects.

The zone system can be equated to the levels histogram, in particular IX and X, anything above Zone X and it is pure white and your picture is burnt out, nothing can be seen but a slab of white. We should aim for whites in Zone IX. We want to be able to see the detail such as rivets, fuselage panel joins etc and not one continuous slab of white.
(you will need to cut and paste this into your browser to view the picture.
http://i26.photobucket.com/albums/c110/WShackleton/Jet%20photos/zone-chart.jpg

You can see by the histogram that your pictures whites should be in the region of 225 to 245 and not seem a grubby grey colour.

One thing to watch out for is highlights. Some parts of your photo will inevitably fall into Zone X, it is how much that we need to watch out for, some glinting highlights is permissible but slabs of poorly exposed aircraft is not.

If you use a Photoshop product, call up the levels palate, IMAGE, ADJUSTMENT, LEVELS or (Ctrl + L) The histogram is a representation of the range of tones in the picture from the Zone 0 (0), to Zone X (255.) Look for the small black and white triangles under the histogram. Hold down the Alt key and move one of the triangles. You can see the clipped areas, blacks are deep blues and white is naturally white. Select colour dropper tool (I) and press the F8 key to see the level values.

Holding my hand up the lower tail is burnt out, it was my desire to clean up the Strathallan sign and I forgot about the aircraft.

This one, the brightest part of the picture is the prop blade, it is sitting at the 245 mark, with a few small highlights along the leading edge and undercarriage struts.