Hi Slobodan,
It started that I bought a new camera and I was interested in seeing the purported advantage in DR. I knew the advantage was there but I could not find any subject showing it. Also, have seen very few images where I felt camera DR was a problem. So I started to check out many images and found that very few of my images had a dynamic range exceeding nine stops.
Also, the cameras I have used since 2006 had quiet decent DR, but also images from other cameras I have seen seldom had issues with DR. Another issue is that a very wide dynamic range needs a lot of tone mapping to be pleasant on screen.
Take this example from Gotland, Sweden, in this case I used HDR tone mapping and some other things on a single image;
Now, a straight import of the same image in Lightroom looks like this:
I don't think the second image is very attractive, but I'll admit that the first one is "over the top".
If I check out the DR in Rawdigger we can see that the dynamic range is around 8-9EV.
This is possibly even more obvious if I use a linear scale on the vertical axis of the histogram, see below.
So you need no DR champ to handle it, just learn to expose to the right and how to process your images and chances are you can be happy with the gear you have!
Best regards
Erik
Hi Erik,
To tell you the truth, I am still struggling to understand the reason behind this thread. Are you suggesting that, in real life, scenes do not have more than 11 stops? In which case the 3-stop advantage of D800 over 5DIII would not matter? You showed one such example, but then you said "There is still some noisy detail" in the shadows. Well, if it is noisy, than additional DR would have help, no?