I spent an hour this morning photographing with the Pentax 645D camera in the Bower Woods of Red Deer. Unfortunately there wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the contrast between the shadows and sunlit areas was huge. So I purposely started searching out areas of complete shade or nearly so. I found this quiet spot where the recent rains have created a pond which some years is totally dry. I was able to create an image that held both the highlights and shadows by very carefully adjusting my exposure and referring constantly to the review histogram. I then opened it in Photoshop CS5 and opened up the shadows a tiny bit as well as pulling down the few extreme highlights to a point that looks very close to how I was seeing the area with my eyes. I am rather impressed with the ability of this camera’s dynamic range and being able to hold detail both in the highlights and the shadows. I didn’t have my 5DmkII with me to compare, but it seems that this Pentax camera has the edge in the area of dynamic range and easily in resolution.
[Pentax 645D, Pentax-D FA 55mm f/2.8]