Dynamic range

So it’s been five days already. Shooting here is quite hard I found out. During the day, light outside is very hard and bright, but shadows are nearly black. I find myself shooting at 1/4000 of a second and still having to stop down to f5.6 or even f8. A lot of the project on the other hand; meetings, rehearsals and video shooting, happens indoors. Then all of a sudden everything is dark. With only one light or a tiny window lighting the place, I find myself shooting at 1/30 or even 1/15 of a second with full opened lens and ISO sometimes up to 2000 or 2500.

The hardest part is when you’re shooting from the outside in or the inside out. The difference is huge and I have to pull all strings to manage and have detail in both. Still the Monochrom is doing an amazing job. Looking at my histogram, I try to shoot with the emphasis on the right side (opposed to what I was used to with my dSLR). As I can get some details back in the dark areas, but if some area is burned out, it’ll stay white and detail is completely lost.

Because of those bizar differences between light and dark, postproduction takes a bit more as wel. Some photo’s I had to shoot with certain settings so I wouldn’t have burned out areas, while the actual subject would then appear to be completely black (for example inside the house). In lightroom I would have to boost the black parts, sometimes with even 2 stops, to get the result I wanted. Sometimes that would meen using noise reduction, but to my surprise the Monochrom did deliver every time!

It’s also good to be here with Joshua, a photographer from San Francisco, who is a huge inspiration. Watching him work and studying his work, made me look at things with a different eye again. Daring to go for unusual angles and with a different perspective, I feel that I again can take things to a next level.

But of course there are also the shots you just want to take because they are there… When you have two Kenyan bands together in this old deserted building, you just have to make a group shot… This is where the 24mm Elmar again proved itself very useful!