3kramd5 said:
Kit. said:
DR is theoretically limited by photon noise (Heisenberg's uncertainty).
Agreed. The more light you record, the more shot noise you encounter.
Actually, that part of the shot noise belongs to the lighter pixels, while people are more interested in darker pixels when they are talking about sensor's DR.
The effect of the larger well depth for a sensor pixel is that it allows you to shoot at lower base ISO, increasing the photoelectron count and thus decreasing the
relative shot noise for darker pixels. However, that only works if you
can decrease your ISO to the base one. Which is not always the case. When you shoot birds in flight, for example, you usually cannot.
3kramd5 said:
Kit. said:
If you are saying that "the more the better", so there is no DR that is "enough", then, unfortunately, the photography in this world is not for you.
I'm saying "the more the better" in the capability of equipment. There is a point at which equipment can no longer improve in one dimension or another, and that's fine.
If you approach the problem as a camera engineer or a gear-obsessed camera enthusiast, it is fine. No one else is going to have any better, no matter how they try.
But if you approach the problem as a photographer, "fine" lies at a different point. You look at the scene and either you are going to press the shutter button or not.
When it comes to DR, you are not going to press the shutter, because of one (or more) of the following reasons:
1. The DR of the scene as would be "enough" for you to capture it is beyond physical limits of the photography;
2. The DR of the scene is wider than the one you would like to be reproduced;
3. The scene is repeatable and someone with higher DR gear may capture it better, making your shot irrelevant.
Only the 3rd case is really about "the more the better" in relation to the subject's question.
3kramd5 said:
Kit. said:
I am saying that sensor's DR is not the only limiting factor in the tonal range of the scene that needs to be represented, so there is some (scene-dependent and use-dependent) "enough" for DR.
Yes, of course. If shooting a scene which can be entirely recorded with a 5eV system, 5eV is enough, and 15eV is not better for that scene. But it's better that your system be capable of 15eV rather than 5eV, in case you want to image a scene which requires it.
The scene that
requires 15 EV to capture is not always worth reproducing (the case 2 above).
Of course, if your scene only needs 5 EV and 15 megapixel to capture in order to be worth reproducing, it might still be nice to capture more information (both spatial and tonal) from the scene than you currently need, but still 5 EV of your camera
is enough to press the shutter.
(and by the way, the binary logarithm of exposure is EV. eV is "electron-volts", a measure of energy)
3kramd5 said:
Kit. said:
3kramd5 said:
I mentioned cameras because we are conditioned to evaluating photographs taken with devices which can not record the entire range of tones in a scene. I can look at the wall by a window and see both foreground shadow detail and background highlight detail.
Actually, no, not at the same time.
What do you mean? That my brain is doing some processing?
That the picture
reproduced in the same tonal range would look ugly, at least at first glance.
In the real world, the details in the dark foreground and the details in the light background are parts of different scenes, and you don't need to be able to match them together. In the picture, they are parts of the same composition.