Faculty of Art

Photography

Atena Vaezian

In Search of True Tone

Tone is fundamental to photography. When it comes to printing photographs, you can divide the processes into photographic and photomechanical. Photographic processes involve light, exposure, and often darkrooms, while photomechanical processes involve ink, pressure (printing press), and reversals. Tone is what makes printmaking possible. Ink behaves in a binary way: it is either present or absent, similar to 0s and 1s in computers. To achieve greys on paper, printmakers had tofind creative ways to translate black ink onto a surface (matrix) and then onto paper. This is where halftone comes in.What is a halftone? In order to mimic continuous tone, the image is broken down into configurations of dots; large, closely spaced dots create darker tones, while smaller, more dispersed dots create lighter areas. For this project, I took a series of photographs and tried four different photomechanical processes and compared their characteristics and limitations. I wanted to know what determines the size of the dots. For each medium, I tested both a maximum frequency (smallest dots) and a low frequency (larger dots). Halftone became a way for me to understand and control exposure within photomechanical processes