a friend shoots exclusively in mid- and large-format black & white. he will repeatedly visit the same scenery locations over a period of years, only shooting one or two images and only shooting when the scenery is special enough to warrant the picture. he's patient and intelligent and his photos are delightful.
the dynamic range of his photos is astounding, at least compared to what I can get from my 350D. some of his photos from within a recent film-shooting location show great detail from the dark corners of the wooden floor to the outlines of the lit light bulbs in the lamps hanging from the ceiling. I can't do this with my 350D. I can either have detail in the dark and blow the highlights or have detail in the highlights and black out the dark areas.
is this a limitation of digital photography, or of my 350D? will the Mark III (I have one on order) be better with the extra bits it provides?
I know very little about the technology but I'm conjecturing that with digital sensors, the compression (or sampling or sensitivity) of the light across the range from black to white is not even, that the compression is more severe (i.e., fewer levels) at the lower and upper regions so that less detail is retained in these regions than in the middle region. I know that in my bird photos, detail is quite often very murky in the darker areas making it very difficult to get 'acceptable' photos of dark and black feathered birds without 'shooting to the right' and losing details in the brighter areas of the photos.
in my quest to get more detail and a greater range of light in my photos, any enlightenment would be appreciated.
regards,
Gregory