I know, photography has been calling for years about its separatedness from painting, but it's still a 2D imaging medium, objectively speaking. I was pondering about a way to summarize the monochrome photo "palette," i.e. the sum of recognizable pictorial elements that photographers manipulate to make a photographic picture. Most of the books explain proper exposure in detail, but I was interested in the pictorial building blocks we recognize and manipulate in a picture. I came up with the following:
Composition
Subject matter
Purpose
Angle of view (wide, normal, tele)
Areas of focus (bokeh vs. detailed areas)
Perspective (controlled by view camera movements)
Grain size
Grain density
Sharpness
Gradations
Contrast (global, local, micro; lith contrast)
High-key/Low-key tonal arrangement
Tonal mapping (i.e. the impact of filters+film in mapping the colored world to the monochrome space, and what it does on our perception of the depicted elements)
Tone of image (warm/neutral/cold/sepia for normal metal halide; blue for cyanotype, etc)
Size of print
Paper base color
Paper finish/texture
Print reflectance range
Mounting/framing material
Exhibition context
In monochrome, there is a wealth of different materials that constitute the toolchain, but what I wanted to do was to list a vocabulary to describe the content of a photo. You can achieve a high contrast with all sorts of materials, but in the end it's still a high contrast. All of the above elements are variables that are constitutive of a photo, and are the end result of an entire process. What do you think is missing?
Composition
Subject matter
Purpose
Angle of view (wide, normal, tele)
Areas of focus (bokeh vs. detailed areas)
Perspective (controlled by view camera movements)
Grain size
Grain density
Sharpness
Gradations
Contrast (global, local, micro; lith contrast)
High-key/Low-key tonal arrangement
Tonal mapping (i.e. the impact of filters+film in mapping the colored world to the monochrome space, and what it does on our perception of the depicted elements)
Tone of image (warm/neutral/cold/sepia for normal metal halide; blue for cyanotype, etc)
Size of print
Paper base color
Paper finish/texture
Print reflectance range
Mounting/framing material
Exhibition context
In monochrome, there is a wealth of different materials that constitute the toolchain, but what I wanted to do was to list a vocabulary to describe the content of a photo. You can achieve a high contrast with all sorts of materials, but in the end it's still a high contrast. All of the above elements are variables that are constitutive of a photo, and are the end result of an entire process. What do you think is missing?