Dynamic Range

I remember being out walkabout one afternoon and spotting this Porsche. I was on the same side of the street as it and it was hard to get a shot because not only was that tree and trash can in the way, but the angle of the sun had the car heavily backlit. I wound up walking down the block and crossing the street to get the shot.

A big part of the problem was the camera itself. I was using an original Canon EOS Rebel DSLR from 2003, which has a 6MP CMOS sensor. I could have used spot- or center-weighted metering to expose for the car itself, but the background would have been entirely blown out. It would have been a terrible shot.

Fast forward to this year and that Datsun Sports 1600 I saw down on the Near Northside (maybe it was technically Herron-Morton? anyway...) and the shot posed similar problems. The car was parked in deep shadow, while the background was brightly illuminated by summer sunshine from a cloudless sky.

The big difference was the fact that I was using the Olympus E-M1X, which launched in 2019 and uses a 20MP CMOS sensor.

The crucial difference between the two sensors wasn't the resolution, however, but the dynamic range. The Rebel's sensor had a dynamic range of 10.6 EV, while the newer Olympus has a more modern 13.0 EV range. Nearly two and a half stops of DR makes a big difference in getting usable images. I didn't even use center-weighted metering.

.