Dynamic Range

After having Canon's forums hijacked with Sony fanboyism, a few interesting talks arised in regards to DR. Apparently you need a Sony sensor to do landscape, or to expose interiors and the sky together. In fact, you apparently need a Sony sensor for anything!

I wanted to see if I could push my 6D to it's extremes and get a decent result. I'm aware some NR would be needed, but enough to smear detail would be another matter. I usually don't go past +2 or +3 stops - never had the need to.

In this snapshot I overexposed the cloudy sky by 2 stops, and the meter read that the room was below -3EV, or below 3 stops. When processing, it in fact was 4 stops underexposed. ISO was at base (100) and shot with my 6D using a modified 10-22mm at 15mm. WB was at auto. Crops were done to remove clutter and to allow for an easier comparison.

Top: Original exposure. Bottom: Highlight recovery, +4 stops and some NR.

And the settings used in Lightroom:

With a Canon sensor, you expect an unrecoverable noisy mess at -4EV, but some NR and it was just fine with no noticeable smearing or loss in detail. However, that would be true with my 7D - push past 3 stops and the banding is too great to NR without smearing, while my 6D doesn't exhibit any banding at all, even without NR at +4 stops. I never had to worry about this for nearly all of my photos, though.

Not a great photo by any means, but shows that it's easily recoverable. I may try other conditions to see if the result is the same or not.