Let me clarify my comments, in the off chance that you genuinely misunderstood me to be talking about photography done with phones and other truly pocketable cameras: what I intended to convey is that a roughly six or seven stop subject brightness range covers the great majority of the sort of photography of interest to readers of these forums. To be a little more specific, this SBR historically covered the great majority of film photography in any common film format and camera type, even if one only considers photography done with SLR's or larger formats. This is made fairly clear by reading the discussions of film photography capture and printing technique in numerous texts on the subject: tools and techniques like graduated ND filters are there, but not needed for the great majority of cases (and seem particularly needed with color transparency film for which six stops of SBR is optimistic). As a mild extrapolation, It seems from my observations that the move to digital cameras has not greatly changed the preponderance of scenes with "normal" SBR.
If that's what you mean, BJL, I can only presume it's an assumption based upon the fact that the vast majority of photographic scenes have been captured with devices not capable of capturing even 6 or 7 stops of DR, if one includes 35mm slide film and early photographic B&W plates.
It stands to reason, if one is a photographer trying to make a living with a device that captures no more than 6 stops of photographic dynamic range (PDR), that the vast majority of results will not contain more than 6 stops of DR.
The Graduated Neutral Density filter was always a rather inadequate device bcause the line of graduation would rarely even approximately match the significantly varying, wiggly line that often separates a bright sky from a much darker foreground.
Whilst merging multiple images with different exposures to match what the eye sees when one views a sunlit scene, is now much easier in the digital darkroom, it's not something which lends itselft to critically good results without taking the pains of using a tripod when shooting the limited number of scenes which are truly static, and without taking the trouble to make a good job of the tone-mapping, which is just a fancy word for the processing-compression required of any photographic capture to fit the more limited DR of screen or print.
Whilst I would agree that the majority of scenes that most people actually shoot may not require a camera with a greater PDR than than 6 or 7 stops, I would suggest that's because the majority of shots that people take in general are snapshots of themselves and/or friends standing in front of some interesting or famous artifact, ruin, building, sign etc.
On such occasions, if there happens to be a bright sky in the background, it will be blown. But that's of little consequence since the main interest for them is themselves in association with the famous structure they are partially obscuring.
It seems to me that serious landscape photographers, and let's not forget this is a landscape-orientated site, have always been concerned about the limited dynamic range of their cameras. Didn't Ansel Adams devise the 'Zone System' in an attempt to tackle this issue? Isn't the subject of ETTR one of the most frequently discussed technical issues that's raised again and again, presumably because people sense that their cameras may not be adequate to capture the full PDR of many scenes that they find interesting, unless they maximise exposure without blowing essential highlight detail, and even then perhaps not adequate?
