The 'correct exposure' vs. 'post-processing' dilemma

eNo wrote:
Have you ever felt or been made to feel like a failure because you
couldn’t get the shot perfect in the camera?

No ... I always DO get it right!

SO THERE!!!

I just got back from Venezuela, Mt. Roriama and Angel Falls.

These are difficult subjects, because they frequently are in the
clouds and the foreground is in the shade. The brightness range
is extreme. OR, absolutely everything, you and the camera included,
is in a cloud, and the contrast is awful.

The answer is simple, with a digital camera: expose for the
highlights, save as raw. Use in in-camera histogram ... properly.
That means setting the in-camera defaults (this is a Canon dSLR)
for "faithful" and a seriously negative number for the contrast,
so the histogram relates as best you can do (which is unfortunately not
perfect) to the raw data. Ideally, the histogram would plot the raw data itself.
Also, watch the blinking overload indicator.

One this is done, you have the best possible representation of the
actual data of the scene (short, of course, of multiple exposures
of the same static scene, for later HDR assembly).

Then you use Photoshop.

Of course, in the studio of for commercial staged shots,
all this is silly because you have lighting control. I'm
talking nature shots or others where there is no lighting
control.

The "all in the clouds, low contrast" advice is the same, I
might add ... expose so the top highlight is near full
scale in the RAW, even if the results look, on the camera screen,
to bve seriously overexposed. This is because this gives you the
lowest noise in the image. Of course, this assumes you can take
a long enough exposure at the desired f-stop without subject
shake blur. The exposure can be fixed in the raw conversion.

Doug McDonald