Kalila Snow Jan: Monochrome Color

Monochrome describes paintings, drawings, design, or photographs in one color or shades of one colour. A monochromatic object or image has colors in shades of limited colors or hues. Images using only shades of grey (with or without black and/or white) are called grayscale or black-and-white. However, scientifically speaking, monochromatic light refers to visible light of a narrow band of wavelengths.

For an image, the term monochrome is usually taken to mean the same as black and white or, more likely, grayscale, but may also be used to refer to other combinations containing only tones of a single color, such as green-and-white or green-and-black. It may also refer to sepia displaying tones from light tan to dark brown or cyanotype (“blueprint”) images, and early photographic methods such as daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and tintypes, each of which may be used to produce a monochromatic image.

In computing, monochrome has two meanings: it may mean having only one color which is either on or off (also known as a binary image)

allowing shades of that color, although this is more correctly known as grayscale. A monochrome computer display is able to display only a single color, often green,amber, red or white, and often also shades of that colour.

In film photography, monochrome is typically the use of black-and-white film. Originally, all photography was done in monochrome until the invention of color film plates in the early 20th century.

In photography and computing, a grayscale or greyscale digital image is an image in which the value of each pixel is a single sample, that is, it carries only intensity information. Images of this sort, also known as black-and-white, are composed exclusively of shades of gray, varying from black at the weakest intensity to white at the strongest.

Black-and-white images are not usually starkly contrasted black and white. They combine black and white in a continuum producing a range of shades of gray.

Photography was black-and-white or shades of sepia. Color photography was originally rare and expensive and again often less than true to life. Color photography became more common in the middle of the 20th century and has become even more common since. Nowadays black-and-white has turned into a niche market for photographers who use the medium for artistic purposes. This can take the form of black-and-white film or digital conversion to grayscale, with optional digital image editing manipulation to enhance the results.

Most newspapers were black-and-white until the late 1970s; The New York Times and The Washington Post remained in black-and-white until the 1990s. Some claim that USA Today was the major impetus for the change to color. In the UK, color was only slowly introduced from the mid-1980s. Even today, many newspapers restrict color photographs to the front and other prominent pages since mass-producing photographs in black-and-white is considerably less expensive than colour.

Some modern film directors will occasionally shoot movies in black and white as an artistic choice, though it is much less common for a major Hollywood production. This is also true of black-and-white photography, where many photographers choose to shoot in solely black and white since the stark contrasts enhance the subject matter. Some formal photo portraits still use black-and-white. Many visual-art photographers use black-and-white in their work.

References

From the Ancient Greek: μονόχρωμος – monochromos “having one colour”. "monochrome", Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, 2009, retrieved October 16, 2009 Stephen Johnson (2006). Stephen Johnson on Digital Photography. O'Reilly. ISBN 0-596-52370-X.

Task: In this assignment, we need to treat Black and White as Color. This task requires us to travel from point A to point B. Through this journey you are required to record the moment and create a story telling. You are given freedom to choose the format of this task. This task also requires a clear understanding about the positive and negative color and the balance in visual. We will explore on how to show mood, emotion and expression in monochrome colors.

As the briefing requires a journey from point A to point B, I decided to have a trip around my surroundings with my camera and shutter remote to capture moments and create a love story. There are 2 characters involved in the story a boy and a girl who were casted by me and my boy friend, the story is called "Love is Simple" .