Image Gallery (18 images): Fort Casey and Dynamic Range
Back in late May of 2022, my (then) partner (now wife) and I headed across the border into Washington state for the first time since COVID-19 shut things down in early 2020. We made our way over to Whidbey Island for some hiking and photography out in the beautiful late spring weather. We ended the day by wandering around Fort Casey Historical State Park and took a bunch of photos, including some tripod shots in the dimly lit interior concrete rooms/bunkers under the historic long range military gun emplacements. The old decaying wood and rusting steel, peeling paint, and the evaporative deposits on the walls and ceilings, made for some very interesting shots with lots of unusual textures and creepy details.
Quite often there was only window or door light coming in from brighter rooms, or from the north facing exterior (as in the below animated example), and at times there were single bulbs illuminating a larger space, so that made for many shots with quite a high dynamic range, that is, if one exposes for the highlights and then pulls up the shadows in post, which is what I did. Sometimes I added some fill during the 1/4 to 3.5 second exposures, by quickly waving around a small handheld flashlight that has bright high CRI LEDs.
Below is an animation that shows an original unadjusted image, then the same exact exposure but with fill from the flashlight, and then the final adjusted shot with the flashlight fill (a larger final version is in the gallery linked above)…
As you can see, it was very dark in the room with only reflected exterior light filtering in through the doorway. The recessed room would have been very dark, even after adjusting the shot, so I quickly lit the room with my flashlight in this 1/4 second exposure taken with my Laowa Zero-D 9mm f/2.8 on my Fujifilm X-Pro2. The aperture was likely set at around f/5.6 or so but since that is a fully manual lens, metadata is not available… and after two years, I don’t remember my exact settings either. This shot had the greatest degree of flashlight fill and many shots in the gallery had none, or only a tiny bit to equalize the exposure in a dark corner or portion of the image.
As far as adjustments, here is a screenshot of my main Capture One Pro settings applied to final version of the shot in the above animation…
As you can see, I added quite a bit of Shadow and Black fill to brighten the darkest parts of the image. I pulled back the Highlight and White sliders a lot to avoid losing detail in brightly lit areas visible through the doorway, cranked up the saturation to emphasize all the differing colours and added a shot of clarity to pop all the detail that was deep in the shadows. Since my X-Pro2 is getting old and suffers from some hot pixels, I also cranked the Single Pixel NR slider up to eliminate those. I would say that most of the interior shots in the gallery had similar settings applied.
So it is apparent that one can really pull an amazing amount of detail from the deepest shadows of a raw file from a modern, high quality sensor, even an APS-C one. On the back of the camera, many of the exposures looked nearly black with the histogram piled high at the very left edge. From experience, I knew that I could pull sufficient detail out of the shadows to make some compelling shots with exposures like that, but a novice might be tempted to crank up the exposure to make the image look sufficiently bright on the back of the camera, but that would then blow out a ton of highlight detail.
Much to my surprise, I found the useable dynamic range on the latest 40MP sensor used in the Fujifilm X-T5 to be even greater in situations which require a lot of shadow fill or highlight recovery. Of course the latest full-frame sensors (not the ultra-fast stacked ones necessarily, but the more traditional BSI CMOS ones) and medium format CMOS sensors have an even greater useable dynamic range than what is demonstrated here. With the right exposure and post processing, I personally almost never find the need to bother with a multi-shot HDR composite photo, since a single raw image can give you so much. In case you missed it at the top of this posting here is a link to the gallery with more images from Fort Casey…
Image Gallery (18 images): Fort Casey and Dynamic Range
Finally, here are two more animations, a before and after adjustment of a single raw file, neither with flashlight fill, just shadow fill (and other adjustments) in Capture One Pro. Larger versions are also in the gallery. This photo was handheld at ISO 800, 1/50 second, with my XF 14mm f/2.8 shot at f/8…
I didn’t bother with the captions on this last one since, well, I think it’s rather obvious (as it was before I suppose too!) which one is the adjusted one. This last shot also taken with my XF 14mm f/2.8, ISO 200, f/8, 1/150…
