... blog post:
During the recent cold snap I was able to grab a few pics as the snow was falling that looked almost as if they were in black and white i.e. monochrome, but not quite...
Because of the low light levels, the blur of fast falling snow and the dull colours of winter foliage anyway, everything was low contrast and low saturation, so there was a sort of monochrome effect to the photographs that made them appear almost like black and white pictures.
But if you look carefully there are tones of colour in them, not just shades of grey, and indeed not just a single colour either.
So I began to cast around for a term to express these photos as being like monochrome, that is being very like black and white, but not quite as there is still some residual colour to be seen.
Now, monochrome is derived from mono meaning one and chrome from the ancient Greek word for colour thus "one colour" hence grey or shades of grey from black to white.
So I tried colourchrome but that sounded silly as it means colour-colour, then multichrome but that just means many colours or put simply, colours. Then it dawned on me that the colour palette of the pictures was both very restricted and subdued. There is a word that aptly describes this - muted.
I thus tried mutedchrome. Yes that fitted. These photos have vey muted colours, they have been photographed in mutedchrome. So mutedchrome it is.