WIDE RANGE In this image Noriaki Kimura uses true blacks and whites to highlight the graphic properties of the subject matter, telling us to focus on the shapes rather than the texture
© Noriaki Kimura
In this digital age we can become preoccupied with trying to keep the tones in our images within the histogram scale. Digital capture can be quite unforgiving of highlight detail in particular, and clipping can easily occur if we don’t keep an eye on the exposure. However, handling this can lead to the opposite problem – a lack of contrast. We need to make sure we see true blacks and whites in our images to produce natural and dramatic tonality. While you might want to avoid 255 whites and a blacks value of 0 – indicating solid, featureless areas – don’t allow overexposure of shadows, or whites to turn grey.