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 p.8 #10 · Canon 5D4 dynamic range analyzed from RAWs | |
Lee Saxon wrote:
I mean it's a little embarrassing that they're not top-of-the-charts...
Embarrassing? Hard for me to understand that.
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Again — for perhaps the 125th time — more dynamic range (like less noise, excellent color, improved lenses, better system design, etc.) is a fine thing, and I'll take it with no complaints when I get it. Anything that improves the performance of a tool is ultimately a good thing, at least if it comes at little or no additional cost or at least at a cost commensurate with the advantages it may bring.
If I were at a point where I needed to buy new gear, and I was comparing two options that were otherwise exactly equal but one had somewhat larger dynamic range than the other, I might well choose the higher DR option. But that is near the choice we have before us. Such choices typically involve a range of performance elements that are important: AF speed and accuracy, inconvenience of giving up hard won intuitions about interface, lens availability and performance, cost, ergonomic aspects, and much more. So DR becomes one to balance against many others, and consequently, especially if achieving some additional DR means sacrificing some other things, one has to ask, "How much of a difference will this make?"
When it comes to DR, while the boundaries between the possibilities are often somewhat hazy, there are basically three circumstances in which we find ourselves photographically.
1. The subject is such that the subject's DR does not exceed that of any of the cameras we might choose to use. This, by far, is the most typical scenario. If it wasn't, we would be unable to make the majority of photographs as a result of dynamic range limitations of cameras, but that simply isn't the case.
2. The subject's dynamic range exceeds the capacity of any of the camera options that we might have to choose from in our work. This is the second most likely scenario — the photograph that includes the sun itself along with subjects in deep shade that we would like to make more visible than they actually are, for example, or a night photograph with near black deep shadows and a subject close to a very bright light.
3. The third most likely scenario is the scene in which one camera is incapable of dealing with the dynamic range of the scene and the other is capable. This can happen, but the boundary range is quite narrow in actual DR terms, and it occurs in a very narrow range along the entire range of luminosities that we photograph. In my own experience — and I do night photography and photograph other subjects with wide dynamic ranges — it is so rare that I don't actually have any photographs in which the DR was too great for my camera and some other camera would have had enough and in which I couldn't get an excellent result with normal, known techniques.
Now I suppose that if someone lives most of their photographic life in that narrow third zone that their need to more DR at the expense of other things (fast AF, cost, compatibility with other gear, etc) might rise above that of some other photographers. But I only rarely hear this sort of photographer going on about DR.
DR is a real thing, and more of it is good. But it isn't the huge issue, much less the central issue, and some want to make it.
Dan
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