Boris, To be honest, for the vast majority of shots taken in "reasonable light", most people would not be able to tell prints of photos taken with K-5, a high end point and shoot (like my old lumix FZ50), or even for that matter an Argus C3. It is the special cases, and the question of which special cases that determines when you need the better gear.
As to your automotive analogy, I've got out on the racetrack in a Honda Civic station wagon, or even a full size Dodge Van, and had students in sports cars not be able to keep up with me. On the other hand, I've gone out in my Miata (Eunos) race car, and had students that couldn't get within the same Zip code as the apex blow me away in their 400 hp Corvettes, BMWs etc. Most of the time better performance won't be needed, or even noticed, but when it's needed to overcome adverse conditions, or lack of skill, there's no substitute. Photographers have been doing all sorts of things to match the dynamic range of the scene, with the dynamic range of their sensors (or film), and the dynamic range of the print for decades. I believe that this is what Mr. Adams referred to as the zone system. The principle that I use is to set my exposure to capture the most data in the raw file, and then in post processing, decide how to take the captured dynamic range and present it in the final image. There are a lot of times that I'll specifically adjust my processing to get rid of all of the shadow detail, and other times where I'll tweak the curves to try to preserve both shadow and highlight detail. This, by the way, is one reason why I'll frequently bracket my shots, even though I haven't been doing any HDR work yet, so that in the future I'll have the option of going back and recovering some of that data if I wish. I'm not going to say that if you aren't going to make the effort to optimize the exposure range at both the time of exposure and post processing, you might as well shoot in jpeg, but I will say that if you don't, you may be missing out on a lot of potential in your final images. Just because using the the full 14 bits in a linear mapping onto your print may look a little flat, doesn't mean that you have to do it that way. You might only want to use 10 of those bits, but it's nice to be able to choose which 10 you use. -- Larry Colen [email protected] sent from i4est -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
