Beyond-Time

I've been reading a e-book called 'Craft and Vision I,' which has a series of articles written by a variety of photographers on the subject of "good picture taking." One of the articles focuses on the histogram function on a DSLR. Understand while I have been doing film photography for almost 30 years I am relatively new to the digital world, so bear with me if this has an obvious answer that I'm not seeing.

I understand the basics of what the histogram is and what it represents, but the author of this article made the point that the left-hand quarter of the histogram is where the most amount of digital data is stored. His recommendation is to check the histogram and if necessary to overexpose slightly in order to put as much information into the raw file as possible. I've worked with Photoshop since 3.0 if memory serves, so I get the need to put as much usable data into that raw file as possible. I can also understand why the right side would contain more information than the left.

My question here is the D800 has a reputation for it's raw files allowing you to pull more from the shadows than from blown out highlights, so is overexposing to tilt the histogram to the right good advice with this particular camera? I want to create the best "negatives" I can so I can have fun in Photoshop not frustration.

Turbo Loc: Raleigh, NC

Typically, if you take a pic that has a wide dynamic range ( some very dark areas AND some very bright ones ) your camera sensor may not be able to accomodate the extremes in brightness. And that applies to any digital camera.

If you have a tripod, you can bracket and post process. If the subject is moving, you must decide and take the pic quickly. It usually pays off to underexpose a bit and the details in dark areas are likely to be brought back ( in the raw format) the overblown areas are usualy lost and no amount of processing will bring them back.

SteveR Loc: Michigan

In talking about the histogram at two Nikon Seminars recently, the instructors were more concerned that the histogram stretched completely from left to right rather than the vertical lines. Of course, you wouldn't want a blown out line on the complete right. They also said, though, that exposure compensation can adjust where the mass of those vertical lines fall after viewing the shot in the viewer.

LoneRangeFinder Loc: Left field

The old (film) rule was "expose for the shadows; develop for the highlights". I contend that your author has it backwards for digital: you cannot recover blown highlights. However, every scene is different and may have different exposure requirements.

Beyond-Time

In the context of creating digital negatives for conversion into B&W images that would make a lot of sense unless I am missing something. I would think in that case you would want your histogram to indicate your negative contains a lot of information ranging from Zone III to Zone VII.

Strangely I find with digital I shoot a lot of color images that ended up as Black and White prints. Maybe for me B&W is as good a starting point for exploring digital as it is with film.

mborn Loc: Massachusetts

Read this article from John Shaw It will help you http://www.johnshawphoto.com/ettr-to-the-far-right/ In the D800 you have 1-1.5 stops more dynamic range on the right . Do the test John describes you will be surprised

altheman Loc: Christchurch, New Zealand

Check out this link: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/expose-right.shtml
and when you get to the end follow the link for an update.
I do a lot of HDR so I thought I would check to see if the theory of exposing to the right is correct. I reduced the exposure by 2 stops in Lightroom enlarged the image to 100% and then compared the noise levels in the image with the noise levels in the "correctly" exposed image and there was less noise in the over exposed image. Why is explained in the link I have posted.

speters Loc: Grangeville/Idaho

As long as you avoid any klipping in your histogram you should be ok. The histogram should have lots of information to both sides of it, but no klipping.

SteveR Loc: Michigan

Reading the article reminds me, esp. if you use this tecnique.....do you have your blinkies turned on?

mborn Loc: Massachusetts

I have the blinkies on but do not worry as much since I know I have leeway. Really follow the histogram even though the histogram is from a JPEG

mborn Loc: Massachusetts

Look at my blog where I did the test http://photobee1.blogspot.com/2013/03/expose-to-right-test-from-blog-by-john.html

Beyond-Time

I got a chance to try it out on a few test subjects. What I found was an overblown sky was unrecoverable after about 1 stop of overexposure, but a large cactus that had parts of it overblown recovered nicely after two stops of overexposure. The image was usable, but the one at 1.5 stops was much better.