06-02-2014, 12:08 PM
That's the reply to post #9, sorry it took me a while:
The linear compressing is not what I do when lifting shadows or lowering highlights. Basically, I'm doing something similar like HDR photographers do, but in a less obvious, more subtle way. What I'm saying or try to: The DR of D800 allows me to go deeper or higher or both in range. Usually I leave the midtones as they are and decide if there's interesting information in the high or low tones. Low tones give the power to a picture and hightones define the lightness. Balancing those two poles is something I really like to do. Your pictures - at least the ones I've seen so far - are showing the full contrast range but not many tones in between. I don't find that wrong or worse, it's just a different way.
You're right, there are no devices out there showing a huge dynamic range of (already available) camera sensors. Yet.
But I'm sure, you've seen some of the old glass/film negatives enlarged or scanned with contemporary technique. There is so much more in those negatives than the original photographers have seen. Lucky us, we can see the available information in a much wider range than them have at their time. I could imagine monitors or beamers in the future can show more range - but I also can imagine the opposite. New techniques sometimes improve things and other times the quality decreases. Like the clean sound of CDs sacrificed the wider range of high quality LPs.
We do have 14 bit RAWs and don't have to shoot 8 bit JPGs all the time.
The linear compressing is not what I do when lifting shadows or lowering highlights. Basically, I'm doing something similar like HDR photographers do, but in a less obvious, more subtle way. What I'm saying or try to: The DR of D800 allows me to go deeper or higher or both in range. Usually I leave the midtones as they are and decide if there's interesting information in the high or low tones. Low tones give the power to a picture and hightones define the lightness. Balancing those two poles is something I really like to do. Your pictures - at least the ones I've seen so far - are showing the full contrast range but not many tones in between. I don't find that wrong or worse, it's just a different way.
You're right, there are no devices out there showing a huge dynamic range of (already available) camera sensors. Yet.
But I'm sure, you've seen some of the old glass/film negatives enlarged or scanned with contemporary technique. There is so much more in those negatives than the original photographers have seen. Lucky us, we can see the available information in a much wider range than them have at their time. I could imagine monitors or beamers in the future can show more range - but I also can imagine the opposite. New techniques sometimes improve things and other times the quality decreases. Like the clean sound of CDs sacrificed the wider range of high quality LPs.
We do have 14 bit RAWs and don't have to shoot 8 bit JPGs all the time.