I think it's partially because of the efforts to find single analytical measurements (such as SNR or even read noise, all measured after the A/D stage) of differences that in the end either affect or don't affect how the photo actually looks. We tend to forget that part.
Yes.
For most of this, the issue is not so much how the photo looks, as how the photo could look. Most of this is in the end about what you can do in processing. The discussion is largely irrelevant to people who want to use default processing. In the vast majority of cases the levels of difference will be lost below the black level.
Most of the people who participate in these forums are keenly interested in post-processing, and even those who don't, often care about dynamic range. It's universal. Ansel Adams among many other film photographers was very focused on dynamic range. The painters of the Renaissance were obsessed by dynamic range rendering techniques of paint composition and brush technique. Maximizing dynamic range has always been important in visual arts.
Indeed... the Exposure Triangle is an example of that.
Indeed, one of my cameras has a mere just over 9 EV DR, according to Bill Claff, but it can take pretty good shots with most scenes and the which shots mostly look OK on my about 5EV DR monitor (as set).
Amen to that!
IMHO digital or film, photography is photography, sorry for the banality. Shutter speed and aperture were introduced not to control exposure, that was the role of light. Density was controlled through processing.
Found this jewel today:
It includes the Triangle ;-) :Found this jewel today:
http://pynomo.org/wiki/index.php/Photography_exposure
Beats The Triangle any day ... :-D
It's actually an invention of the digital age.
It has actually been recognised as a simple fact since the birth of photography.
That is very true. And a good start would be to replace the ISO's sensitivity, or speed, control with a gain or output level control.
I don't think that's right, from my own observation of the posts and topics on these forums. 'Processing' as opposed to 'post-processing' is a minority interest, and I would guess that even post-processing is.
If you don't use a raw workflow and process the file yourself, you'll never access the dynamic range available.
What you mean by 'dynamic range' isn't dynamic range. The 'dynamic range' of a processed file in a perceptual colour space is infinite, because the scale starts at zero (black) and every processor can produce a zero. The thing that photographers tend to call 'dynamic range' is rather different. It's the transfer function from exposure to lightness, and a greater (raw) dynamic range allows the range of exposures expressed as different shades to be greater. That was what much of Adams' technique was about, controlling exposure to optimally use the available density range of the film and the film processing to extend that density range as far as possible, then printing to give render that density range to as full as possible a density range in the print. It's worth noting that Adams frequently revisited and reprinted his images, often giving them a completely different treatment.
The triangle is an invention of the digital age. When Peterson started the thing as the 'photographic triangle' the three sides were 'shutter', 'aperture' and 'film'. When digital came around and he updated his book (third edition, as I remember) he decided to replace 'film' with 'ISO'. Then the Web took hold of it, and someone decided to call it the 'Exposure triangle' and people drew diagrams. Peterson never gave a diagram.
If you can find a reference to the 'photographic triangle' earlier than Peterson, or to the 'Exposure triangle' earlier than 2005, I'd be interested.
They can call it what they want if I can get an in-camera Raw histogram.
Hmmm ...
A gain control is quite tricky, because the effect of gain is so dependent on how the internals of a specific camera work. It's difficult to see how an 'output level' control would work when the output level is a bounded quantity. You can't make white any whiter then white and you can't make black any blacker than black.
I had already the opportunity to say that I really like this illustration, not only it is funny but it really shows what the triangle is about.
Pre-gain?
I wonder why one would even want a user control, if the camera was properly engineered. A modern mirrorless camera can get all the information that it needs from the sensor to make an automatic choice of gain. The most you'd want to do is bias it towards highlight or shadow protection.
