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Tone and Blanks

By Mr N

SAM_0750 (Medium)

Painting on photography has long been one of the ways of photographic expression, if not a genre in its own right. With the advent of digital photography and photoshopping, it is being experimented, expanded to new territories and becoming more popular than ever.

If the core of photography leans towards "recordability" of a scene, painting centres more on its readability. Readability is higher when the painting is more heavily loaded in terms of artistic conception. Painting-like photos should therefore set at a higher artistic ground than those for other photography genres. The adoption of Chinese ink-painting techniques in photography holds my interest more. For that matter, the artistic conception can be heightened by the strength of tone and blanks, the reason being that Chinese ink paintings employ only varying shades of grey. Tone can express the dimensions and distances of subjects while blanks can, among other things, complement the shades of grey and make the flow in the painting smoother.

This shot of supposedly a magpie was taken in a sanctuary some 2 hours drive from the city. It is not a black and white image, in case you wonder.

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