Definition - Tone

Tone is defined as the lightness or darkness of something. It can be a shade or how dark/light an object can be. Tone can set the mood of a piece of photography. E.g, a photograph with lots of dark tones would create a dark mood, however a piece with lots of light tones will create a lighter mood.
There can be a large range of tones,ranging from dark to light, or there can be two very clear and contrasting tones.
A word to describe the range of tone is Gamut.

Tone - Work Diary

For my tone lesson, I mainly focussed on the contrast between parts of an object under the light and parts that are cast under a shadow, as this creates a contrast between two a very dark and a very bright tone.

We started by taking some studio pictures, in which we used spotlights to cast things under a shadow. We placed an old baby doll on a chair to be our object we were shining our light on, as the doll was very white, so the part that had the light shone on it would contrast well with the part cast in shadow.                                 0

We also used a small plant, as the green tones of the leaves would create a good contrast to the shadows 

on the side of the plant that will have a shadow cast upon it. The light cast on the plant also created a good tonal range between the different leaves, as they had different levels of light on them.

After this studio shoot, we went out and took some tone pictures at a multi-storey car park. I think this was less successful than the studio part of our photoshoot, as we couldn't control the light levels and where the light was aiming, due to a lack of controlled conditions and a spotlight. 

There's less of a dramatic range of tones, or highly contrasting tones here, but you can still see some tonal contrast between the black tarmac and the bright sky. There are also a few tones in between, more prominently in the bottom image, as there are lights on the ceiling that create some lighter tones amongst the black tarmac.

I think the best shots in the photoshoot were the ones taken in the studio, as they showed a big contrast in tones. 

Above is my edited version of one of my images. To create this, i converted to black and white using an adjustment layer. I spent a few minutes experimenting with changing the intensity of colours, until i discovered that setting the red to minus values would bring out the black tones in the image, so i moved the slider to -45 to create a greater contrast between the dark and light tones. 

Here is another image that converted to black and white. This one was also manipulated through the colour level sliders on the adjustment layer menu. In this i put the yellow up to 100 as that seemed to bring out the light tone of the leaves out more, and the red went down to 10 so that the dark tones were darker.

If i were to shoot tone again, i would keep the idea of taking some pictures in the studio, as i felt that this part went well. However, I would try to use a wider range of objects to try and achieve different types of tone and wider tonal ranges. After the studio session, I would try to go somewhere else that isn't a multi-storey car park, as i felt there were little opportunities to capture tone there. I would try and pick somewhere which has sculptures or interesting buildings, as they would cast interesting shadows that will contrast well to the light tones of the sunlight. 

Here is an example of something i would like create. It has the unsaturated tones of the building and some of the clouds, compared to the sky on the top right, which has very deep and dark tones.

Tone - Straight Images

Tone - Contact Sheet

Tone - Image Bank

This image is in black and white, so there are lots of dull tones, however, there is a large gamut of dull tones, from full white to full black.

This shows brighter tones than the previous image. I has a very sharp black tone as well as two different blue tones.

This image has a small gamut, as most of the image appears in a white or grey tone. The only part of the image which shows a darker tone is the tree, which is closer to black.

This image also has a limited amount of tones. This image has been taken using a Sepia filter, meaning most of the tone is a brownish grey that is typical to Sepia. There are a few deviations from this tone at the back of the Lion's mane, as there are some darker tones there.

The photo above looks almost overexposed. This is because the person who took this photograph has either adjusted the white balance in photoshop or on their camera so that there are lots of white tones. The picture almost entirely consists of white tones, with a few grey tones on the handrail to the right.