If you are a serious photographer, especially of an older vintage, then the Zone System and step wedges are familiar concepts to you. It turns out that having a light bar of eight separate bulbs above the sink in your bathroom and a well-placed door can provide a real-life, albeit slightly imperfect and incomplete, illustration of a step wedge.
Love this image, Larry. Only someone who has spent time in a wet darkroom would think step wedge, though others may recognize Zone System. My bathroom has 3 lights and I still get interesting shadows in triplicate. 🙂
Kathy, actually step wedges are very useful in configuring settings for printing to ink-jet printers. I find on my printers anyway, that shadows will block up even when using the correct paper/printer profiles. Doing test prints of step wedges allows me to determine how to create a curves layer in Photoshop to compensate for that, so that there is more detail in the shadows when printed.
Absolutely right, Larry! I’ve done the same thing for my printer & prints.