Make the most of dynamic range

Neil Freeman shows you how to get the best from the dynamic range of your sensor, giving you more shadow and highlight detail in your images

Have you ever found yourself wondering how to photograph a location in bright sunlight, or a scene where there are intense lights and dark shadows? In these tricky shooting situations it’s easy to ‘block-up’ and lose shadow detail or ‘blow’ highlights, which means you have lost detail in the brighter parts of the image. In some cases, you might even do both. This isn’t an exposure issue, it’s because the dynamic range in the scene is so great that you can’t capture all of the shadow and highlight detail in a single exposure.

Dynamic range refers to the range of tones your sensor can capture, going from the darkest shadow detail to the brightest highlights, and although your camera’s sensor can capture a wide range of tones, there are limits. Different sensors can also capture wider dynamic ranges; while a D3500 has a good dynamic range, cameras such as a D850 or Z 7 II will allow you to capture more tones in an image.

There are many ways in which we can capture the full dynamic range in a scene, we just need to understand which technique to use and when. The quickest and easiest way to check that you are capturing all the detail in a scene is to use your histogram. The histogram can be a useful guide to ensure that you capture all the tones in an image, but remember that it is only a guide and is showing you a histogram based on a JPEG thumbnail even when you are shooting in Raw mode, and so you may be able to recover these lost tones.

On some Nikon DSLRS you can preview the histogram in real time using the ‘Live View’ function before shooting an image.