Exposure, Fall Colors in So Cal.

[lomitamike]

Experimented a bit with different exposure values today. I was reading an article at Luminous Landscapes discussing overexposing to get maximum detail in your images.
You can read all about it here. It really just is a technical discussion about exposing to the right. Maybe just a little past the right. The new things I took away from the article was that most processing software has an extra stop of highlights over your in camera jpeg processor and the last stop of exposure before highlight clipping contains about 50% of all the detail captured in the image.

With this image I took multiple shots starting from -1ev to 2ev and processed them as I normally do. After studying all the images looking for the one that I thought had the most detail. I ended up with 1.3ev as the image that appeared to be the best in detail and color. Of course I did have to pull down the highlights more then I usually do, but there appears to be more details in the shadows.

Of course this doesn't work for all types of photography but for landscape or static subjects there may be some benefits.

Sony A900, 70-400G @ 120mm, ISO 200, f/11, 1/8 sec, 1.3ev.