Please excuse my ignorance if I've got the question wrong.
What I mean is what range of light and dark should the camera correctly deal with in one exposure.
i.e. A sunlit picture with shadows. And clouds in the bright sky. If exposed correctly for the sky will it also correctly display the shadows?
It is my belief that cameras are somewhat limited in this aspect and I am calling it 'dynamic range', hope that's acceptable.
And I believe it has something to do with pixel size in the camera sensor. But I am very vague about this.
I generally think that bigger pixels can handle a greater range because they can absorb more photons. And I see 'the range' as effectively being the difference between 1 photon and the maximum.
So if one photon represents a shadow and the pixels can take 10 photons then the range is brightness between 1 and 10.
But it it can take 100 photons then the range is ten times as good as that. It can handle ten times the brightness.
That's my pretty vague understanding of it all.
My Canon G9 seems to struggle to properly record sunlit scenes here in Australia. I generally get what seem to be underexposed pictures. They are like that because there is much sky in them and the sky is bright.
If I then process them to bring up the detail in the shadows - which may simply be the wall of a building - then the detail in the sky gets washed out - fleecy clouds, say.
So what range should I expect from this particular camera?
And years ago I had a Pentax Spotmatic and always used a UV filter on it.
Would a UV filter be appropriate for this camera in this context?
My (again vague) understanding is that UV light is very energetic and will therefore quickly
'overload' or fill up a pixel in a sensor. Unnecessarily because we don't need to record UV radiation because we can't see it anyway.
So cut it out with a filter and the pixel doesn't get overloaded so easily making it appear as a 'darker' subject. Allowing the camera to lengthen the exposure. Which lightens the shadows.
Can the members tell me what I should expect from this camera and how much of my understanding is wrong and perhaps put me right?