brainiac wrote:
With respect you are all missing the point - both artists, and technicians.
If you don't understand this simple explanation, by all means ask questions, but please don't waste everbody's time with yet another great long exegesis of the 'expose to the right' technique which is something that everybody here has known for years, probably better than you, and which is wholly irrelevant to the general problem of shadow noise in 5D2 files at 200 iso.
I try to steer clear of the "you don't understand" responses. But I think I cannot avoid being explicit about that any longer.
While you and I have agreed on other issues in these threads, in this case I think that you do not understand. I'm not denying that you are seeing noise with banding in the uniform dark areas shown in this sample. (In fact, I earlier wrote something to the effect that this would be the factor that I'd want to look at more closely.)
I DO understand the issues with wide dynamic range scenes and how to deal with them in film or digital capture, and I understand the compromises that photographers always have had and always will have to make when the dynamic range of the scene exceeds that of the capture medium
It is the nature of digital capture that "failure" when exceeding the dynamic range of the capture system most significantly comes in two forms. At the bright end of the scale it manifests as "blown out highlights" where no luminosity values but the highest are recorded. At the dark end of the scale it manifests as a lower signal to noise ratio (e.g. more visible noise) and using fewer value levels to describe different levels (e.g. - banding).
I've made enough prints of photographs of high dynamic range scenes of the type you mention to understand very well these limits and how to deal with them in the camera and in post - and also to understand the effect that they will or will not have in a photograph.
It seems to me that you don't understand this context, which surprises me after seeing so many smart and insightful posts from you elsewhere. (e.g. - your clear reminder to people about the misleading effects of comparing 100% crops of test shots from different photosite density images, and some recent comments you made on a thread that degenerated into a Mac/PC argument.)
Anyway, good luck with this line of reasoning. I think I'll skip out on the chance to pursue it beyond this point - for now at least.
Take care,
Dan