Dynamic range. Dynamic Range is how much a camera can see from the darkest darks to the brightest brights. Our human eye has 20 stops of dynamic range. That's a really wide range. There's no camera that can match the human eye right now. And because of that, we have to be aware of the cameras limitations so that we can utilize it as best as possible.

So a good high end camera right now is going to give you about 14 or 15 stops of dynamic range, which is really, really good. But as you have just heard, we have 20 stops roughly and the human eye so there's gonna be areas that the camera can't see all in one photograph. So if you think of dynamic ranges, this linear scale, you've got zero to 100 Sorry, zero to 20 stops, and we keep saying stops, that's just a unit of measurement for what we're talking about. So you've got 20 stops, and a camera only has 15 stops. So it's about this big. That scale is going to slide within this 20 stop range that our eye can see.

We're controlling that with our shutter speed, aperture ISO, where we want that camera to end up. So anything outside of this range of dynamic range that the cameras got isn't going to be blown out on the high end, which means no information that's completely white pixel, or it's going to be completely black and there's no information in that. So we need to appropriately set our cameras exposure for the scene that we're looking at so that we can capture as much information as possible. So that when we go into post production, we don't go to kind of bump the exposure down and the white parts of the photo, stay white That's what a blown out pixel is. And that's no good. So dynamic range is really one of the most important camera specifications that often gets overlooked in in exchange for maybe megapixels or something like that.

But dynamic range is hugely important. The more dynamic range you have, the better your photographs are going to be. A great example of where a camera doesn't stack up to the human eye is a sunset. So if you've ever been in a situation where you're looking at the sunset, coming down, there's colors in the sky, everything's really awesome. And you've got somebody that you're with and you're looking at them with the sunset behind them. You can see them you can see the sunset, you can see the colors.

Now you may have pulled your cell phone out or took a camera out and you try to take a picture of that scene. And you either get the person that you are with is completely dark and you see all the colors in the sky or the person that you're taking a picture of looks normal. And properly exposed and the sky is white and completely washed out. That's because your camera doesn't have enough dynamic range to take both things in at once. your subject is much darker than that sky is, and our eyeballs can see it all all at once. But your camera is basically telling you, Hey, I got to pick one I can either expose for the person who's much darker than the background, or I can expose to the background, which is much brighter than the person and that's up to you what you want to expose for inside of that range.

There's ways around it. In that situation, you could take out a flash and light your subject. Now you're going to bring the level of light up on your subject to match the intensity, the background, and now your camera gets to play in one smaller, confined area of exposure and it's got enough dynamic range to capture that. You can't really turn the lights down on the sky, but that would be the other thing to do is bring the background light down if you have control over it to match the level of light that's on your subject. So you're trying to balance the light. And this can happen, whether it be outside, it could be indoors, if you've got somebody that's standing in front of a light behind them, and it's lighting up the room, and they're dark, you're going to need some light source in the front of them.

Always trying to balance the light, bring everything as close together as possible, and then your camera's dynamic range can wrap around that scene. I know I say this about everything. But this comes with practice, being able to look at a scene and say to yourself, my camera is not going to be able to capture all this, I need to make an adjustment. I need to make a compromise. I need to do something to take this photograph out of the ordinary. That's just going to come with taking thousands of thousands photos.

The more you do it, the more you'll be aware of what's going on. And the more you can prepare for it before you take the photo, look at it and say, what's going on. Why is this dark? You'll just know that's going to help you a lot it may be that someone's standing in front of a window and you can't cover the window. Maybe there's no shade on or something like that. But you can move the person, move them so the background isn't so blaringly bright behind them.

A lot of things can be taken care of just by rearranging the scene that you're taking photograph of. So this is a very helpful thing to be aware of. You can't control the dynamic range in your camera, but you can control your taking photos up and you can control the lighting and a lot of situations and work with the dynamic range in your camera to take excellent photographs.