To: John Elder. You are simply making a straw man to beat based on your interpretation. I will not follow it any farther.(posted 8143 days ago)To: DJ. When you discuss some property of the film-developer combination, don't you hold lighting condition fixed while you vary film and/or developer? It is true there is a lot to do with lighting and subjective judgement in real images, but that's not what we are concerned about when we discuss tonality and accutance of film-developer combinations.
The following is bit off topic.
"One of the most exasperating things is that there is nothing in our vocabulary to help us discuss how micro-contrast and macro-contrast interact." (N Dhananjay) Well, it's not that exasperating. There are other things that we know have to do with each other but the relation is poorly understood. For example, some argue photographic lens design, in-focus and out-of-focus image qualities, which are quite well understood in terms of optics, but many photographic optics users do not care about it and not well understood by those the users. There are many things we can't discuss quantitatively, but a large part of it is due to lack of our understanding of how we perceive such visual (or other forms of) stimuli.
You ask wine tasters: "what does integration mean?" "what is good finish like?" "waht's the difference between depth and complexity?" and you will hear similar kind of discussions, if not worse. (though this doesn't justify we stay happy with what we know now)