Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Dynamic Range and More

Dynamic range has become one of the most important camera specs for a lot of photographers and videographers, but there's a lot more information and science behind it than you might have realized. This excellent, comprehensive video will teach you everything you need and ever wanted to know about dynamic range.

Coming to you from Filmmaker IQ, this excellent video dives deep into the topic of dynamic range. Dynamic range is a hot-button topic for a lot of photographers and is often considered one of the fundamental measurements of the quality of a camera sensor, but there's more to it than simply the width of the range of stops a sensor can record. There's some very interesting psychophysics at play in the mathematical relationships between light and how we actually perceive and process it. In addition, it's crucial to understand how your camera records information in relation to each stop. Stops represent a doubling of halving of the total amount of light, and thus, information is not spread linearly across the stops, but rather, the bulk of it is concentrated near the top, which is where techniques like exposure to the right come into play. Check out the video above for the full rundown.

Alex Cooke's picture

Alex Cooke is a Cleveland-based portrait, events, and landscape photographer. He holds an M.S. in Applied Mathematics and a doctorate in Music Composition. He is also an avid equestrian.

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2 Comments

This guy is amazing. Such good information. Incredible resource!

This presentation has helped immensely in my transition from 55 years of understanding film to the understanding of Digital.
Thanks