Word: toning
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Polaroid film were exposed in the hope of trapping their own Ansel Adams image, rather as tourists in 18th century Italy sometimes carried a smoked lens called a Claude Glass, through which the landscapes of the Roman Campagna could be seen in the mellow brown tone of Claude Lorrain's canvases. To that public, Adams is as American as John Wayne: the last portraitist of Western sublimity...
...term f/64 designates the smallest lens opening on cameras then used, the one that gave the greatest depth of focus and hence produced images that were sharp from foreground to background. To these photographers, f/64 also stood for "straight" photography, as against pictorialist fuzz. Instead of continuous tone, they went for high contrast. They also cropped and isolated their subjects: driftwood, seashells, worn rocks at Point Lobos, or the polished interior of Weston's Mexican toilet bowl...
Adams' entire career represents a sustained, meticulous effort to order the jumble of the natural world, its colors, its erratic tones and shifting values, into a precisely tuned structure of differing grays. Some of his color photographs are beautiful. But they do not have the sense of a convention transformed and upheld that animates his black-and-white prints. The "feel" of Adams' monochrome work is utterly distinctive. It conveys an intense reverence for material: the density and solidity of rocks, the cannonball moon floating in a dark-filtered sky over Half Dome or the New Mexico desert...
...hardly seems the stuff of which bestsellers are made. Academic in tone, occasionally plodding, inundated by footnotes, the nation's latest buzz book is not a fast summer read. Yet in only one month in the stores, more than 35,000 copies of Energy Future have been sold at $12.95 each, and Random House is beginning a fourth printing...
...gives us a German conductor-cum-dictator to hammer home his message, so he creates his supposedly symbolic revolution out of such literal-minded devices as graffiti, falling plaster and gunshots. Certainly the movie's point comes through loud and clear, but, as art, Orchestra Rehearsal is distressingly tone-deaf...