Black and White Tonality

[Mike Farley]

Mike Johnston of The Online Photographer has just started a series of blog articles about black and white tonality. It might prove worthwhile following what he has to say, so I am providing a link to the first post. People can make up their own minds whether to continue.

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.co ... white.html

[davidc]

Considering he says he's more interested in the why rather than the how he spends an awfully long time talking about tone curves, densitometers, and bar graphs before ending with a "ignore everything I just said, there are no rules".

[Mike Farley]

Considering he says he's more interested in the why rather than the how he spends an awfully long time talking about tone curves, densitometers, and bar graphs before ending with a "ignore everything I just said, there are no rules".

I just knew you would be impressed.

I am not sure how much I got from that particular article and it seemed more like an introduction to the topic than anything else. Time will tell whether it develops into something more significant.

[Mike Farley]

Hmmm. Mike Johnston appears to have finished with the topic. Despite starting off by saying it is a big subject, apparently it requires just two articles. For his latest post, he has moved on to writing a lightweight piece about Sony's new mega-camera. Given his track record and stated enthusiasm for monochrome, I was expecting more. Perhaps there will be, but it does not look hopeful.

[davidc]

As you can tell his articles don't hugely appeal

[Mike Farley]

As you can tell his articles don't hugely appeal

Would you believe that he makes his living from the blog? In his defence, I would say that he usually posts five times a week, which is quite a feat in finding subjects to write about. I suspect, though, that to an extent he is living on past glories. A while back, he moved twice in the space of a year, relocating to a completely different part of the country the second occasion. Up to time of the moves, he was usually an interesting read. Since that time, he has never consistently recaptured what he had previously.

Nevertheless, he has a long association with photographic journalism and is still one of the better bloggers out there. When he puts his mind to it, he can write about aspects of photography others ignore. Too frequently these days, though, he does resort to writing about equipment and there have been a too few many such posts recently.