High Dynamic Range

It's not 1 word, but I have really been enjoying it.

" One of the problems of films and even more of digital sensors is their capacity to reproduce scenes with high contrast. This is characterized by blowned high-lights and/or completely dark shadows, whereas in the field, the eye discern much more tonalities. Sensors have indeed a limited dynamic range (a capacity to record variations of luminosity), inherent in technology employed. It is thus necessary in such scenes to choose between an exposure preserving high-lights, or an exposure preserving shadows. There are however solutions, but which impose certain constraints in term of shooting. We will try here to understand HDR photography and its usability."

Nicolas Genette, on August 21, 2007 NicolasGenette.com

Exploring HDR has been an interesting leap because it has breached the gap of what I felt was missing in Digital photography from film. It is very similar to the Zone System for film. An HDR image can be composed of multiple images or 1 image. When composing and HDR from a single RAW image, the similarities are more apparent. It defines the .RAW format as the closest thing we can get to a digital negative. If you shoot to correctly expose the shadows, the RAW image will contain the information to also pull out the highlights. The RAW can be used to produce multiple images at -2 -1 EV +1 +2 for example, and it can do this much better if it was shot as the +2, because the camera knows what the image looked like at 1/60 if the sensor was exposed for 1/30.