CanadaMark Offline Upload & Sell: Off
|
molson wrote:
If I couldn't get my exposure accuracy within 6 stops, I would probably just give up photography... or maybe just buy a better camera.
It's not all about getting your exposure right. The more extreme examples just help to clearly illustrate the differences between sensors at a glance. Sensors with better DR have advantages well below 6 stops, it just means they are proportionately cleaner at, say, a 3-4 stop push which is not at all uncommon. You might be surprised at how far some images get pushed - some lenses need well over +3 EV correction in the corners just to auto-correct vignetting, and that's a baseline before any other adjustments. If you then need to raise the image even one more stop in post, you are already at 4+ EV towards the edges of the frame, and that is easily into the territory where DR deficiencies start to obviously show up in the images, especially on worse performing sensors. The better the sensor DR, the less image quality degradation you will get in those everyday situations.
Another example might be if you were shooting to protect highlights, chances are you are going to need a significant shadow boost in post to even the scene out. Personally I shoot some birds that happen to have a mixture of black and white on them, so I am often raising shadows a fair bit if I shoot to prevent blowing out the white feathers. Blending multiple exposures is sometimes an option, but not with anything that moves and it's extra work. Wedding photographers run into similar issues with white dresses and black suits.
As to when you might actually need a 6 stop push, it would be more for trying to salvage an image that was accidentally exposed poorly and maybe you were on vacation and don't have an opportunity to re-shoot it. Stuff like that. Always better to have than not have. I know I've been happy to have that level of shadow recovery when I occasionally mess up my settings or forget to change something from a prior shooting session, even if it's not 6 stops, being able to get clean results from a big shadow push has a nice safety net for when it is occasionally needed. Even looking at the differences in the above example, I think that could easily be the difference between a keeper and a throw-away image if you were having to try salvage something.
|