You guys won me over to ETTR

Having grown up with B&W film, a manual camer, and a darkroom in the basement there were a few simple rules I understood well. While the understanding of light and exposure and most importantly composition helped me as I moved into digital, it took me a while to start wrapping my head around the ways in which a sensor behaves very differently from film.

A couple months ago I began to "stalk the light" around where I live in Boston. Ansel Adams, Galen Rowell, and the other great landscape shooters out there would spend weeks or months camped out in the wilderness waiting for that one perfect moment. Boston doesn't have the natural surroundings of Seattle or the SF Bay, but it has a few pretty angles in its own right and since I live here, I decided to start studying how the light behaves. If waiting and being there is half the game, then that's a game I can win!

Anyway, one of my regular haunts is a stretch of waterfront on the East Boston side of the harbor just over the hill from where I live. When I'm home, about half an hour before sunset I'll peek out the windows to see if there are clouds for the fading light to bounce off, and if it looks promising I'll go for a walk and see what I get.

One of the challenges I've had at this location is that the city skyline is facing the wrong way, with the sun setting behind it, so I've usually ended up with the sky exposed well but the buildings melting into noisy shadows. The skyline is too irregular for my usual grad ND filters, so the past couple times I decided to try taking some shots ETTR-style as well as following my usual approach from film days (minimum ISO, avoid blowing highlights).

This shot yesterday convinced me that it's a valid technique for certain times and places. This was shot at ISO 400, with the orange blinkies showing in a wedge of sky right above the two tall buildings on the left side, as well as some blue ones under the pier.

I pulled the exposure down 1EV in LR4 along with the highlights, then lifted the shadows to bring the pier and buildings back. The light itself was kind of "meh," nice but I've seen far more spectacular, but it's pretty and captures the feel well. It is a little unusual for the wind to be this calm at this hour, though, which did contribute something a little special.



Pixel-peeping was revealing as noise was well-controlled e.g. with buildings' windows being well-defined while color noise in the sky and dark areas under the pier was absent or hard to find. The sky area that was blown out in the EVF likewise appeared to retain just enough detail to get by. Looking at it onscreen it appears this image could tolerate printing well beyond the 17x22 size I've grown used to. Definitely more IQ in the hard areas than I was used to seeing with my standard technique.

Anyway, after the many slash-and-burn threads discussing this topic I am glad I decided to give the technique time and more tries and will continue to experiment with it. I certainly don't think it's a necessity even for scenes that are well-suited for it, but if you are looking to wring every bit of performance out, it is definitely worth your time to try it out.