In search of dynamic range

I took my first photography class in I think sophomore year of high school. I shot with an old Minolta X-700, which I think belonged to my mom, almost exclusively on Kodak Tri-X 400 black and white film, which I processed myself in class. I learned about composition, the rule of thirds, light, shadow, and how aperture, shutter speed, and ISO all work together to adjust how you shoot and the effects you can achieve. I loved it, and was pretty good at it; I won an award for a negative process architecture shot I did. I have that shot framed and hanging in my office, with all of my printed and mounted images there, too, along with all of the negatives I’ve ever shot.

I got my first digital camera my senior year of high school, a Sony DCS-T33, a tiny point and shoot with an internal optical zoom with Zeiss glass. I absolutely loved that camera, and took it with me on my first trip to Europe during the summer between high school and college.

My next camera was a Canon 7D, my first DSLR; my best friend, who had gotten me into photography to begin with, had the 5D and, while I couldn’t justify the price of one, I could afford a 7D (I still go to him for photography advice to this day; neither of us are professional photographers, but he and his wife use to shoot weddings). I remember trying to get my camera insured as part of my renter’s insurance; when I told the agent the cost of my gear, he said I needed to get business insurance. I assured him that no, I swear, this is just a hobby. Photography may be one of the most expensive hobbies in the world, but it was just a hobby.

It was with my 7D that my digital photographic style started to emerge. I had heard about this technique, High Dynamic Range, or HDR, photography where you take pictures and different exposures, underexposing some shots, overexposing some others, and stitch them together digitally. This brings up the shadows and brings down the highlights, getting you a picture with more flat lighting, and an almost ethereal look, across your picture that’s especially good for when there are harsh lighting conditions, like shooting out a brightly lit window where you want to get both the inside and the outside lit well (you see HDR images, usually really badly processed ones, in real estate listings for this reason). Our eyes have excellent dynamic range and can handle this well; cameras can’t. I decided I liked this look, a lot, and basically since getting my 7D every picture I’ve taken has been in sets of 3, for me to then go back and stitch together into an HDR.

My subject of choice has always been landscape and architecture, so my next camera was a Canon 6D, my first (and last, so far) full-frame camera. It also had a built-in GPS for geotagging, seemingly custom-designed for my kinda of photography. I lugged that gear with me, eventually amassing a decent sized collection of Canon glass and gigabytes of images, mostly triples of the same picture, in my pursuit of the dynamic range I got from shooting HDRs. I even was doing panoramas; imagine shooting a 5 or 10 image sequence for a panorama, and each one of those being 3 pictures! 30 individual shots to make up a single final image! Each trip, needing to go through literally thousands of images. It was a lot.

I eventually got tired of lugging all that gear around, when a new camera came on the scene, the Fujifilm X-T1. I immediately was drawn to this camera. Unlike almost every other digital camera system out there, it had full manual controls for ISO, shutter speed, and aperture, set up just like my old Minolta! Combined with a digital viewfinder that showed the changes in real time, it made shooting in manual fun and easy, bringing me so much joy that I didn’t mind I was moving away from my (excellent) Canon lens collection and to a crop-frame sensor from a full-frame. Photography was fun again! I did something pretty wild with the switch, too. I only shot with a 27mm pancake (~35mm equivalent) for years. I have the amazing Canon 16-35mm which was my go-to landscape and photography lens, the stellar 18-135mm walkaround zoom, and the legendary 70-200mm behemoth that wouldn’t feel out of place on the sidelines of a sporting event. And I walked away from all of that for the feel of manual controls. But you know what stayed? Shooting three of everything, just to get that dynamic range.

Around this time, something interesting started happening. The photography adage “the best camera is the one you have with you” (which I’ve always incorrectly attributed to Ansel Adams but I’ve just learned was coined by Chase Jarvis, and relatively recently) started to really hit home for me. My X-T1 was great, I could really bring it just about anywhere, but the advanced processing that my iPhone was doing with each picture I took really made it so easy to get really great results. It was (and still is) doing the same kind of processing I was doing to make HDR images, just invisibly, always in the background, making every picture everyone takes look great. That’s a great thing! But I also think it’s changed how I view my photography.

For my birthday this year, I got a new Fujifilm X-T5, a camera I’ve been holding out for for years. With it, I got the 16-55mm f/2.8 lens, one of Fuji’s best (and something I’m salty they just updated like a month ago). I no longer need something small to shoot with, my phone is plenty good for an every day shooter, I wanted a setup to get back to photography my phone can’t do. It was around this time I started putting together snugug.photography as a way to share what I’ve taken over the years. It had me (and I’m no where close to done) going through and re-editing many of my old photographs with my accumulated years of knowledge and my new eye. And a funny thing started happening.

The more I went back to my old photos, the more I wasn’t liking the HDR rendering I had been doing. It was a lot of effort, and on my older camera systems, it was producing closer to the shots I had in my mind, but with what was coming out of my X-T5, it was more and more looking like bad real estate photography again. Maybe I’ve gotten better at editing my photos, maybe my style has changed, or maybe what I’m looking for has evolved with what I’m able to do with my phone, but all of a sudden the way I had been shooting for like 15 years didn’t quite feel right anymore.

I just got back from a trip to London where I decided to try an experiment; could I go the whole trip without shooting any bracketed shots for HDR. The answer is no, but I came close! My first day, my photos are only ok, but I started playing again. Without being concerned with stacking, I started playing with shutter speed and aperture to get daytime long exposures and better focus in on the subject I really wanted. On Day 2 I figured out how to enable the histogram in my viewfinder to make sure I wasn’t blowing out my whites, and how my camera’s built-in dynamic range settings work (you can boost the single-image dynamic range in-camera kind of like how phones do, provided you have a high enough ISO, all without taking multiple shots and stitching them together). I started using the camera’s back panel LCD to get different shooting angles. I learned I’ve got about a 50% hit rate for hand-held 1s exposures between the image stabilization in my lens and my camera. I felt more connected to my camera, to what I was shooting. It was like I rediscovered tools I had forgotten about because I had been focused on this one particular style of shooting. I still shot about 1600 images in a week, but most of them weren’t bracketed, they were just, well, photos! And the results?

I’ll have the album up some time this month, but wow. I’ve got some shots of stained glass windows where everything around it is black, classic classic HDR territory, and my X-T5’s built-in dynamic range is so good I can pull those shadows up to see everything while my highlights don’t get blown out. Every single one of the shots I did in my old HDR style looks just as good, if not better, without the stacking. Better still, I can output actual high dynamic range images (where the difference between the black and whites are large, as opposed to where the lighting is flattened through bracketing) using my Fuji RAW files that I can’t do with my preferred HDR merge tool, and I’m liking those more anyway.

We’ll see what next year holds, but I think after shooting for over 20 years, I’ve finally found the dynamic range I’ve been looking for, and I couldn’t be happier as a photographer.