For scenes with good light, there isn't a camera on the market that has insufficient dynamic range. In most situations where you might wish your camera had more dynamic range, the proper solution is almost always to fix the light. Generally, fixing the light for landscape photography means waiting for the magic hour. With most other types of photography, it means properly using flash and / or other light modifiers.
Sometimes, but rarely, the whole point of the exercise is to capture some sort of setting with extremes of light. Such light is
not attractive in and of itself, and it is the harshness of the light which one is capturing. In those cases, the scene as you look at it will have lots of areas of reduced contrast, including shadows and highlights where you cannot discern details. Somebody mentioned the cave entrance at noon; in the real world, it would be a black hole, and the puffy clouds overhead would be too painful to look at to see detail. If you're shooting that scene, it's presumably because you want to capture the feeling of looking into a bottomless abyss while in the harsh light of day, and you'd expect the print to have a similar lack of detail in the cave and clouds. If, instead, you really do want to capture the detail in both, you should wait until sunset when the last rays of the Sun gently light up the inside of the cave, at which time that light will be well balanced with the colorful clouds. Or you should be painting the scene as you imagine it rather than trying to photograph it as it isn't.
The most challenging HDR shot I've ever done is here:
http://www.canonrumors.com/forum/index.php?topic=12617.0And that really is very much what the scene looked like as you stood there. Yes, I could have gone all painterly and created something surreal and tonemapped that showed details that you couldn't see, but then it wouldn't look like what the scene actually looked like. You really could only just barely pick out the details in the shadowed parts of the Canyon, and, though glasses, the Sun still looked small and bright with a hole in it but lots of glare surrounding it. And the layers of the Canyon receding into the distance really did almost blend into the horizon, and the foreground really was that bright and contrasty.
If I wanted a painterly photograph of the Canyon, I wouldn't have shot into the Sun during an annular eclipse; I'd have camped out during thunderstorm season and hoped / waited for a day with a good sunset -- and I'd have been on the North Rim, not the South. I'd still have bracketed the exposure and still might have wound up blending a couple of them together, but the final image would largely have looked like the straight-out-of-the-camera middle exposure. If I did blend exposures, it'd most likely just be a simple pair separated by only a couple stops with a gradient blend, simulating a graduated neutral density filter.
About the only times I can think of when more single-shot dynamic range is of any significance is for digital fill flash for event photography in bad light. But, even then, either you're doing journalistic-style photography and you should be representing the scene as it is, or you're doing dynamic portrait photography (such as for a wedding) and you're being paid to make the light what it needs to be. In other words, either you should be letting the whites blow and crushing the blacks, or we're right back to fixing the light.
Really, when it comes right down to it, an extra two stops of dynamic range is nothing more than a single file that's the same as a +/- 1 stop bracket already composited together. Big whoop. Saves me the least important step in the creative process.
Cheers,
b&
