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splathrop wrote:
Got a question for dynamic range buffs. You have a scene with dark shadows. You can shoot it with a high-dynamic-range camera, and lift the shadows later on your computer. Or you can use flash to lift the shadows as you make the exposure. Are the resulting finished images the same? Do they differ in any systematic way? Curious about opinions on this.
Not so much an 'opinion', more simple fact.
If all you do is 'lift' shadows, you are just moving everything up and rescaling. You can do things nonlinearly or move the tone curve around to try to minimize it, but a face that is in shadow is still going to be darker than the rest of the scene that wasn't in shadow. It's just going to be less dark than it was before. If you don't want this to happen, you have to do something like seperate the image into different layers, use tone mapping, selective color brightening / darkening / saturation adjust, etc. Some of these can be time consuming, others may not 'work' for a specific photo, and so on.
Now when you apply additional lighting to the scene, it can do good things, or bad things, depending on the quality of the light, the angles, and the relative light source sizes (a direct fill flash is very close to a point source, so if anything it typically just hurts the quality of light on the subject). But as long as the flash is isolated to the subject, which is easy to accomplish in most cases, then you can bring the subject up to a level where they are even with, or above the rest of the scene.
In practice I like to always shoot faces in at least the midtones or better, if I am shooting faces in the shadows with plans to bring them up later, it can be very difficult to check in camera for the usual flaws like eyes open, good expression, etc.
"(Personally, I am hoping for a pair of lenses I can implant in my eyes which will record everything I see throughout the course of the day and I can go back later to create individual still images from the footage). And my point was when that day comes, the technical stuff"
I'm not sure why people focus so much on self-augmentation like that would make the perfect camera. If you could do this, you still have to be there to take the photo. Even if your capabilities improve, your content pretty much stays the same. A truly revolutionary jump would be to build remote units or drones, each of which could function remotely and independently or be taken control of by an experienced photographer (when it makes sense). Then you could photograph in places you normally couldn't, you could 'be' in multiple places at once, and you don't have to travel or physically move around to get unique content. In a sense, we are almost there today, except for the expense and that few drones are designed for taking 'good' pictures from a photographic point of view.
Edited on Feb 22, 2013 at 05:37 PM · View previous versions
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trust me, there are more clowns running our countries