Travel Photo tips – The perfect sRGB histogram
This is the perfect example of an image with textbook-perfect histogram. Shadows, highlights and midtones of the scene of Meijikan in Hakodate are distributed almost perfectly within the dynamic range that a digital DSLR is capable of reproducing it.
A histogram in digital photography is a graph showing the distribution of highlights, midtone and shadows of an image over a 5-stop exposure range. A perfect histogram indicates a perfect lighting condition of a scene which recorded a mountain-shaped graph across the exposure range, with the highest point at midtone and gradually sloping down at both sides. The below is the histogram of the above image.
Why I referred the above as an almost perfect histogram is due to the slightly blown-out shadows and highlights. The little bit of loss of details could never be seen in the actual image above. Contrastively, slightly over extreme shadows and highlights help in creating a more striking image with high contrast and brightness.
After all, this is the kind of image that we can post straight out of camera without any post processing action. Unfortunately, we cannot always achieve this since we cannot always predict the lighting condition on our travel. Different direction of sunlight, time of day, perspective and objects with different reflection factor will all affect the perfect shape of the luminous histogram. In view of that, modern DSLRs introduce digital technics to improve the light distribution of an image to make sure those lights reflected by the scene fall under the dynamic range of DSLR, such as Active D-lighting function of Nikon.
Having said that, our DSLR can’t do wonders. We as the person behind the camera should learn to understand the behavior of different lighting condition on our travel so we can achieve “Posting straight-out-of-camera” most of the time. And this is travel photography… 🙂 – Travel Feeder, your ultimate travel photo blog
About The Author
Cecil Lee
The author is an avid traveler and photography hobbyist who loves to share with others his travel and photo-taking experience in many popular tourist destinations around Europe, Asia and Australasia. Read the exciting stories with many photos captured on his journeys.
