This will be one of two posts this week to make up for missing last week's post.
Dynamic range, to oversimplify a bit, is the measure of the ability to see detail in both the highlights and shadows of a scene simultaneously. The human eye can see approximately 24 stops of dynamic range, while the highest end cameras, to my knowledge, have a (theoretical) high of 14. That's quite a big gap, and it's the reason you can clearly see the face of someone sitting under the shade of a tree while also seeing clearly what's out in the midday sunshine, while your camera will have to pick one and forget about the rest of it.
Dynamic range, to oversimplify a bit, is the measure of the ability to see detail in both the highlights and shadows of a scene simultaneously. The human eye can see approximately 24 stops of dynamic range, while the highest end cameras, to my knowledge, have a (theoretical) high of 14. That's quite a big gap, and it's the reason you can clearly see the face of someone sitting under the shade of a tree while also seeing clearly what's out in the midday sunshine, while your camera will have to pick one and forget about the rest of it.
That used to really annoy me when I first got started with photography, but that limitation does lend itself to creativity when you consider that your camera can "see" things in a way that you can't with the naked eye. That's the story with this photo. This particular swathe of grass was catching some pretty direct sunlight at an angle in the late afternoon the other day. Standing out there at the time, I could see the shaded grass detail just fine, but by setting the camera to expose for the brighter part, it lost most of the shadow detail, helping to highlight the parts I wanted to draw attention to, admittedly with a little help from Photoshop to push it further and accentuate the effect to my liking. It's a technique called differential separation, and no I totally didn't just come up with that jargon-y term while writing this post, why would you even ask that?
EXIF data:
1/3200, f/2.8, ISO 160
200mm focal length
1/3200, f/2.8, ISO 160
200mm focal length