RAW File exposure latitude

The following image was taken using a Nikon D300 and the modest little Nikon 35mm F1.8 prime, that I reckon is a seriously good bargain in today's world of hugely expensive new and exotic optics.

When visiting Kingston Lacy today I wanted to get a few snaps of my wife and baby with the sunlit house and other nice features in the background, to give the images some context.  It was such a lovely sunny day that I was faced with the usual dilemmas in deciding how to deal with the huge dynamic range presented by most techniques.

Choices (or at least the ones I thought of!):

1) Place the subject in the sun and take the shot so the exposure was largely even on the subject and background...I hate this as people squint painfully or wear sunglasses.

2) Place the subject in the shade and expose for the subject, while accepting that the background will blow out totally....far from ideal if we want to retain some background detail and context.

3) Place the subject in the shade and expose for the background, then pop in some flash to throw fill light on the subject and balance the exposure....I love this option, only I didn't have a powerful speedlight on me.  My built-in flash was not capable of putting enough light in at the max sync speed of 1/250th sec and the necessary aperture to hold the background exposure to near normal.  An SB800/900 speedlight could overcome this by entering high speed FP sync mode, which enables shots to be taken at any shutter speed by emitting a continuous burst of flash for the duration of the exposure, rather than a single pop for a short period during the exposure (more on this another time).

4) Take at least two exposures optimized for both the background and subject and merge them using layers and erasing in Photoshop....I didn't have a tripod to keep the camera aligned between images and I don't like spending hours on software post-processing, especially for family snaps.  In any case I'm simply not clever when it comes to PP!

5) Compromise on the exposure and adjust it once downloaded....This is the option I chose through knowing my camera and how far its RAW files are capable of being pushed.  At a 0EV exposure the background was mostly ok with a few blown highlights but the subject was vastly underexposed.  I chose to overexpose the image by 1 stop so I blew out more highlights in the background and lifted more detail from the subject.  In Lightroom 3, I simply dragged back the highlights into the range of the histogram and introduced fill light into the subject.  I then increased contrast and added a modest curve.  Hardly any time at all.  I therefore placed the exposure between the extreme values in the image at time of capture, knowing that neither would be exposed correctly at capture, but I could work from that point later to bring the detail out.

Obviously its no masterpiece but I quite like the effect of the bright background and much more detailed subject as it enhances the separation already in place from the choice of aperture.  It illustrates what can be done with a fairly ordinary image when taken in RAW and when some thought is given to exposure at the time of capture.   The headroom available in the highlights and the detail recoverable from the shadows does vary between cameras (the D700 is stunning, D300 is good) but its surprising what can be achieved and pseudo HDR images are often composed by pushing a single RAW file above and below 0EV by a stop or two.