So tomorrow around 2:00 am we all (if we're all awake then) set our clock's time forward. It's bad enough that we're going to adjust "ourselves" to this time, let alone the task of changing every clock, being analog or digital, in our homes and vehicles not to mention our wristwatch. I just know this might take another full hour.

Continued at 9:00 am. So, one of my favorite mags – "camera arts" has shrunk down in size, an inch taken off it's length and width. Publisher/managing editor – tim anderson's reason is purely marketing, for the mere reason of making it stand out on the newsstands. It's definitely working effectively, I wouldn't have come across mine, if it weren't for the "size". Btw, I enjoyed george dewolfe's article (intro to the series) on "the master print", and every article and artists feature, in this bi-monthly, is a winner! (no deliberate suck-up from my end.)

Again, this (here) family man, has limited time for anything personal, so I'm going to dive into what I've started initially, hoping to finish it up before any "necessary" household chore arises.

The idea of this lengthy write-up, might have been a mistake in the beginning, like a "foot in the mouth" sort of  thingy, but anyway, I will try to undo it  with some form of finesse.

What I am about to touch on, the concept of "E-T-T-R" (expose to the right using a histogram), is with "no" intention to plagiarize or capitalize, but to indicate an "affirmation" and "acknowledgement" to this great "vital and applicable" concept for my  photoshoots with a DSLR.  Thank you and Kudos, Michael Reichmann for the informative article in American Photo.

Ubiquitous "histogram" usage, from scanning negatives and prints on a flat-bed scanner, to tweaking image's color, hues or contrast during post-production in photoshop or any image-processing software, should (personally) from the get-go, start (if using a DSLR) with the usage of the camera's histogram-tool on it's  sensor-acquiesed image. Besides, the tiny monitor on any DSLR, renders itself partially unreliable in assessing "exposures" from the image viewed, because the screen (as mr. Reichmann verbatimly states) doesn't have the needed dynamic range or color accuracy, and the ambient light level in which it is viewed can make a bad exposure or a good one look bad. This is why camera makers provide a fairly unambiguous tool for judging exposure, the "histogram". He continues… "A histogram is simply a graph of a scene's brightness values as recorded by your camera, including their distribution and relative amounts. The dark tones are on the left of the graph, the brightest on the right; the height of the graph's peaks has no numeric value. If the peaks and valleys are bunched up against the right side of the graph, it may be overexposed."

Time is up.. interruption has occurred. I shall continue this on later. I just hope no one  reads this "blog entry"  before I ever finish it. Is this sloppy or what? What can I say? Spare yourself and purchase the latest "American Photo" magazine and while you're at it, pick up "Camera Arts", also.

(again) ciao for now.

I'm back.

Mr. Reichmann states - that most film exhibits a non-linear sensitivity to light: the top and bottom of it's tone curve, which represent light and dark tones respectively, start to "shoulder off" into a less severe, more gradual slope.

He continues - A digital camera's image sensor, on the other hand, responds to light in a one-to-one fashion, producing a "straight line" tone curve from lower left to top right. "think" of each pixel on the sensor as a bucket, and light as rainwater; once a bucket is full, any additional water (light) simply spills out, uncaptured. On the other hand, even when it isn't raining light, the pixel buckets are never completely empty: there is always a bit of water left at the bottom. In the digital world this is called the "noise floor"; it is there because electronics generate a residual random signal even when not recording anything. 

He continues to explain – that an electronic image sensor records fully half of all the available tonal data in the brightest stop of exposure. The next-brightest stop captures half of what remains, and so on.  As illustrated below, a typical 12-bit DSLR records a total of 4,096 brightness levels: 2048 in the first stop; 1024 in the second; 512 in the third, and so forth. By the time you get to the shadows there's little data left, so, given the ever-present noise floor, you'll want to put as much of that data as possible on higher reaches of the tone curve.  In simpler terms, you "bias" your exposure toward the brightest values. When shooting in JPEG mode and bias your exposure too much toward the brightest values, you risk overexposing the image and losing highlight detail. (the bucket overflows when it's full.) moreover, just 8 bits of tonal information, a JPEG's severly limited range of brightness – 256 levels versus 4096 that your DSLR's image sensor can capture – doesn't lend itself to major tonal adjustments after the fact, using software.

Before I continue  to scratch the surface on Michael Reichmann's ETTR concept, I just want to convey, firstly, that at the time I read his article, it truly made clear sense to me, that I instantly said to myself – "this is one helluva digital photography-evangelist" and he came at a time when I needed most.

He adds – "the story is altogether different when you shoot in RAW mode, which retains the sensor's full 4096 levels of brightness. While a JPEG emerges from your DSLR essentially as a finished photograph, with RAW files and software you can make substantial adjustments in the brightness of a captured image without compromising its overall quality. This post-processing flexibility allows you to apply an "exposure strategy" to digital photography that Michael Reichmann calls Expose to the Right, or ETTR for short. ETTR is simple to apply, but to do so you need to refer to the histogram – that mountain-peak graphic on your camera's LCD screen representing how the scene's tones are distributed. If you've set the camera to display it, the histogram will appear whenever you review a picture you've just shot."

In a histogram, the dark values are to the left and the light values are to the right.  With the ETTR technique, you deliberately bias your exposure, changing f-stop, shutter speed, and/or exposure compensation so that as much of the mountain range as possible appears to the "right side" of the histogram. (Diagram B). the extra exposure moves the dark tones away from the noise floor, producing cleaner-looking shadows. By moving the dark tones higher up on the curve (Diagram  D), it also places them where more data space is available. The result: smoother and more pleasing gradation. Diagram C indicates a typical normalized histogram.

When you Expose to the Right, though, be warned: the image that comes into your RAW converter program will probably appear too light. This doesn't matter as long you haven't "blown out" any important highlights; with the exception of shiny chrome, the brightest bits of white clouds, and the like, nothing should be beyond the right edge of the histogram. Once you've imported the image, you can rein in its overall brightness to produce the result you want.