The current generation of digital camera sensors have an amazing dynamic range. Coupled with the latest versions of Photoshop and Lightroom, the available technology now gives photographers the ability to render contrasty scenes in a way that were next to impossible when shooting film. I was able to pull this image of Ponytail Falls in the Columbia River Gorge out of a single capture on a Nikon D600. No HDR apps, no time-consuming multiple frame blending.
The scene looking out from the alcove behind the waterfall had an extreme range of contrast, from the almost black rocks in the foreground to the bright light coming through the forest and the whitewater in the pool. I wouldn’t have even tried shooting such a contrasty scene with a transparency film like Velvia.
The very first time I shot with a pro-level DSLR, I was hooked on digital. My first captures showed me that I was no longer so constrained by the limitations of film. I finally had control of both contrast and color rendition. In the ten years I’ve been shooting digitally I’ve seen enormous improvements in image quality. And as we’ve all seen, photographers can now produce images that would have been impossible just a few years ago.
Do you think we’ll continue to see improvement on such a scale as the last decade?
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