Project 1: Dynamic Range.

In this first project what we're asked to look at is the "effective practical" Dynamic Range of our camera, basically what this is asking us to find out is what are the darkest and lightest values that the camera can capture. To find this out you're asked to produce a set of shots and stitch them together to produce what you see below.









To produce these shots what i did was follow the instructions in the course material and take a sheet of white paper and place it in the daylight, next i got my camera mounted on my tripod and set the camera to its lowest ISO setting (100), next set the White Balance manually to daylight then finally set the camera to Manual mode and adjusted the shutter speed and aperture to produce and average exposure (these settings begin 0"8 at f/8 this being about the mid range aperture for the lens i used). Now knowing what the average settings where you asked to work out the settings that would produce a image 6 f-stops darker then keep increasing the f-stop by one until you reached the average settings once again (this gives you the dark range for the camera). Next you continue increasing the f-stops a further 6 images which then gives you the light range of your camera.


To form the above image i had to use Photoshop to stitch the shots together, to do this it involved resizing the canvas and then using the copy and paste method keep adding the images to the end of the chain. This was made easy to complete because its clearly explain in the course material so you have no problems understanding the process although i did find that because I'm using a slightly new version of Photoshop some of the stages where under different tabs or named a little differently but if you know you way around your software this isn't a problem.


Next i needed to take some readings from the image I'd produced so i could see what the Dynamic Range of my camera actually is. By passing the cursor over the image you are given the RGB value of each shoot. Below is the list of values-

• -5 R=0 G=0 B=0
• -4 R=22 G=22 B=22
• -3 R=41 G=41=B=41
• -2 R=62 G=62 B=62
• -1 R=100 G=100 B=100
• 0 R=130 G=130 B=130
• 1 R=167 G=167 B=167
• 2 R=226 G=226 B=226
• 3 R=237 G=237 B=237
• 4 R=251 G=251 B=251

To then find the Dynamic Range of the camera you have to move the cursor until the RGB values climb above 5, this was around the join between -5 and -4. This gives you the bottom end of the cameras range, to get the top end you do the same thing but look for the values to climb to around 250 or below which i found around the join between 3 and 4. This then in turn tells me that i have a camera that has a practical dynamic range (this is what when you print your images will be visible in the dark and light areas) of about 8 f-stops 4 either side of f/8.

For the final part of this project you are asked where the mid-grey step lies in your sequence, if its to close to the white it will mean that the light areas in your photos can appear burnt out (this means they will appear overly bright) or oppositely if to near to the dark end the shadows will appear overly dark. Luckily for me the mid grey sites as it should smack bang in the middle of the range at the 0 point meaning that I'll be able to have good control over the exposure avoiding the shot being to dark or to light.

For an opening project in the course i found this a very technical and challenging one to begin with, i understand that you need to understand the limitation of the camera before you can do anything else and now with digital camera technology its more important then ever to have the understanding to get the most out of your kit.