Introduction – history and the reason why

My first camera was an Exakta Varex IIa SLR with 3 prime lenses and a Weston hand held exposure meter. Over the 30+ years I had this camera, I was very happy with my shots, b&w, slide and negative, and my photograph methodology. When this camera began to give up the ghost, I moved to Nikons and owned 2 SLRs in the next 10 years. These had zoom lenses, automatic focus and exposure meters. It took me some time to adjust to the modern technology and I adapted my methods.  I was quite happy to spend up to an hour setting up a shot of a mushroom, fiddling with reflectors etc. and most of my photos came out as I wanted.

Then came the digital age and I’m racing through cameras – all Nikons – Coolpix 990, 4500, DSLR D70 and now D700 in the space of 6 years. In my ‘hayday’ I might have taken a roll+ of film a day – now I click away and have once taken over 1500 shots in the space of 2 hours! The whole way I approach photography has changed. No longer do I spend the hour taking the shot. Instead I rattle off the shots and then spend the time post-processing it!

I now tend to believe the Camera’s exposure and only set the Aperture, or Speed, for the effect I require. If in doubt I happily fire away a bracket burst, as it costs nothing. I also take bracket shots to get the detail I require from contrast subjects, knowing that I can merge the images together to create the scene I visualised (I use a tripod for all ‘serious’ work).

My ‘new’ camera has a failing in that it only allows +/- 1ev bracket steps and so I can wind up taking a lot of exposures (and using a lot of memory) for very contrast subjects. I do not have a simpatico relationship with the camera's metering and I feel I am just using it without understanding the limitations of this digital medium – both in the camera sensor and the computer display screen. As for getting the prints I require – that is a further complication.

So I feel it is time I stopped, slowed down and get to grips with this medium. I need to experiment to learn – the following records my journey and what I learnt.

Basic idea

In order to learn, I think I need to know…

a) how well the sensor will capture the scene
b) how true this is to what I photographed
c) and how much latitude I have in ‘correcting’ the image

Camera dynamic range

and so lastly I move into the Lab colour space and reduce the saturation to zero - this makes sure (I think) that the Luminosity does not change. 
Because of my lighting, and lens, the image was not entirely uniform and there can be a variation of 1% in the L values.

To start the ball rolling I compared my 3 cameras...

Note that middle grey is not the same for each camera and so this just gives a flavour for the cameras, but I think we can see that the sensors and camera processing has improved over the years!

But where is this getting me?  There are hundreds of combinations of settings on the camera which will change it's response. 
I thought I would home in on just a few for the D700.

So the top end is not too bad, but the shadows are really compressed compared to the fixed 9 stop (real world) wedge.

But I did a little more research, which you can skip!