I remember a workshop instructor once suggesting that photographs live in Zone VIII. I'm not sure a definitive statement like this is universally accurate, but it definitely points in a direction I've found true more often than not. If we lose those delicate highlights, we end up with a gray smudge or an invisible blankness. I've found that the best images have, like us humans, a dependence on respiration. If a print doesn't breathe, it isn't alive. And that breath seems to reside in those delicate highlights..

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