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Some years ago I was reading Henry Peach Robinson's book Pictorial Effect in Photography (a text from the 1860s) and ran across a compositional device he termed "breadth" under the discussion of chiaroscuro. I hadn't seen this term before and spent some time with his rather confusing description of it.
The general idea, as nearly as I can tell, is this: while a photograph is a collection of various tones which delineate the various objects in the frame, there is also a larger sense of overall tone to be considered.
Ansel Adams spent a great deal of time banging on about a complete range of tonal values, from rich blacks to white whites, and this has been largely taken as gospel. You can...

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Andrew Molitor
Andrew Molitor
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Andrew became a mathematician about the time the internet became the world-wide-web, but fell in to software development by accident. After 25 years of that he's just Dad. All along, Andrew took pictures, some of them small ones, and formed opinions, some of them big ones. He lives in Bellingham, WA, with his beautiful wife and two small daughters. Andrew's slightly unorthodox ideas for the beginning photographer can be found here: http://intro-to-photography.blogspot.com/
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