DPP: Exercise 9: Scene Dynamic Range

This exercise is a continuation of the last, but requiring five scenes in a variety of settings and ranges.  Here is the first.  I will add more as the week progresses.   The image was captured in P mode with matrix metering and wide-area auto-focus.  The camera was then set to spot metering and single focus, and meter readings taken at each of the spots indicated with an exposure setting.  The image shows a middling dynamic range, with 3.3 stops between the darkest and lightest elements.

DPP: Exercise 8: Your Camera's Dynamic Range

The previous two exercises looked into perhaps the biggest issues in digital capture:  highlight clipping and noise.  These correspond to the camera's extremes of the tonal palette, the light and the dark, and it is this range that is examined here.

The brief calls for shooting a scene with a range of contrast in bright daylight .  It also calls for a white card, but this was omitted since the scene had a couple of reasonable sized white patches (the bar on the No Entry sign and the painted curb).

The scene was shot in AP, multi-metering mode, with no noise reduction.  Extreme brightness required using exposure compensation to dial down 1EV.   Playback showed some clipping on the white curb, but as the previous exercise indicated the camera overcompensated in its display of highlight clipping, I thought this exposure would be adequate and not show any clipping once imported into LR.

DPP: Exercise 7: Tolerance for Noise

The brief for this exercise calls for a series of captures at the camera's full range of ISO settings with the intention of demonstrating noise.  Noise may be the result of insufficient photons striking the sensor and may occur when shooting under low light, with long shutter speeds, or high ISO settings.  The result is the speckling effect seen in the right image in the pair above, showing captures at 80 (l) and 6400 (r) ISO.

The Exposure Triangle: Aperture, Shutter Speed, ISO

Course author Michael Freeman reminds us that “right from the start” we should familiarize ourselves with the following basic concepts.  This shouldn’t be hard to do, as all three photography classes I’ve taken spent a great deal of time talking about just these things.