By Joseph Kashi, for the Redoubt Reporter Nothing is more
critical to making good photographs than proper exposure, and
nothing seems more murky and arcane. Good exposure is the result
of properly managing the dynamic range of the image and matching
it to your camera’s capabilities and how you visualize your
photo. It’s more important than the number of megapixels on the
sensor. What, you may ask, is dynamic range, and why is
something that most people never heard of so important? A
camera’s dynamic range controls your ability to show detail in
both dark and bright areas. Higher dynamic range allows you to
show darker shadow areas with texture and detail, rather than as
pitch black, while at the same time holding texture and detail
in brighter highlight areas, rather than showing a blank white
expanse. The human eye’s dynamic range is astoundingly high, far
more so than any digital sensor or chemically based film. As a
result, one of the most basic photographic problems is to adjust
the more limited dynamic r