Back in the days of film, I shot only transparency — and in the latter days, primarily Fuji Velvia which was very contrasty and had rich, almost unnaturally saturated color. Transparency film was unforgiving and had very little dynamic range, meaning that it could only record a small portion of the range of lights and darks that you could see with your eyes. While digital still is far from being able to record an image with as wide a contrast range as the eye, it’s closing the gap. As I’m processing my photos from Egypt, I’m seeing that my new Nikon D700 has closed the gap even more.
I would have been hard pressed to get the shot above back in my film days. The sun was blazing and the contrast between the brightly lit stone in the courtyard of the Mosque of Mohamed Ali in Cairo’s Saladin Citadel and the shadows in the upper reaches of the surrounding arcade was huge. Still, with some minor tweaking in Adobe Lightroom 2, there is detail in every nook and cranny (reducing the image for the web has crunched the contrast a bit again but, trust me, the full size image has a ton of detail).
The camera doesn’t make a great photo, the photographer does. But a good camera can enable a photographer to capture scenes that would otherwise have been nearly impossible. I consider it a partnership. Technology is a tool like any other and I’m happy to make use of it.
update: I lost momentum on my Alamy goals while in Egypt. You can see by the chart below — the steady line is my goal of 10 images keyworded per day, the green line is my actual progress. I was ahead of schedule before Egypt but the flat section shows my lack of progress while I was out of the country. Time to make up for lost time now.
