Matt Grum

@FW. It's not possible without some reduction in field of view / change of focal length. Otherwise you'd be able to screw something on the front of an f/2.0 lens to make it an f/1.4 lens. The Metabones Speed Booster only works because it screws on the back of the lens.

If you're viewing an image projected onto a focusing screen (like when using an SLR) then the aperture of your eye is irrelevant to whether what's seen on the focus screen is brighter than the view with the naked eye, since your eye aperture applies a constant brightening factor to both. If you're talking about holding a lens up to your eye, than that's an optical system with two apertures and is therefore only as fast as the smallest aperture.

p.s. if you want to get in touch I'm [email protected]

@rfusca I would be happy to do an interview - I tried to look up your email address but failed so I'm posting here!

right I've gotta go, I'll have to swing by here more often when I've got time!

looks like some hefty noise reduction smudging going on in that photo

that spitfire shot is awesome!

you can keep your lotto - I'd rather gamble when the odds are in my favour!

I pressed the wrong button

For the record I'm interested only in providing the highest quality information possible, and always reach for evidence to back up any claims I make. If it seems like I'm unwilling to change my viewpoint I assure you that is not the case and in many cases I've edited answers based on comments made. You have contributed many great answers so I wouldn't want you to leave the site.

You said "your examples [studio portraits and static scenes] still constitute less than 5% of all pictures most people take" this to me says 95% of pictures are not static, i.e. have movement, and thus aren't suitable for adjusting exposure and reshooting. I say that about 50% (possibly more) are suitable for adjusting and reshooting - that includes portraits where the person is posing! So 11.5 million landscapes vs. 6.5 million portraits proves nothing. Taking into account static portrait images it's not a stretch to imagine about half of those images being static.

I've never seen clouds move so fast that exposure has changed in the two seconds it has taken me to look at the histogram and adjust exposure. I disagree that "an awful lot of photographs contain people". I just went to flickr and select recent photos by Canon Rebel Xsi. Out of 17 photos only 3 contained people. 3 contained animals. The other 11 were still life/landscape shots that would have easily been static enough to tweak exposure in order to ETTR.

Yeah probably, the clouds seem to move pretty fast on yours ;) Anyway it was just an example. Flickr is a reasonable representation of what the average photographer shoots as is the Digital Rebel. You could repeat experiment many times and I'd bet the results would be similar. My original estimate of 50% was based on people I know and general observations of photography. People shoot landscapes. A lot. What's the basis of your claim that 95% of shots are sports/action/weddings/anything-else-that-moves-too-fast-to-adjust-exposure-and-reshoot?

5%?! I'd say a conservative estimate is that static scenes where you have time to check your exposure after a shot (and shoot again) make up about 50% of shots for a typical amateur photographer, some photographers more like 99%. I'm not saying they do check the exposure after every shot, just that they have the opportunity to. ETTR means increasing the exposure presumably for some gain (e.g. better SNR), I don't see how shooting tethered makes any difference to that definition.

I agree you shouldn't be trying to push the histogram to the right if you're relying on the camera's metering under changing lighting conditions, you're bound to overexpose something. But there are plenty of situations where ETTR makes sense but bracketing doesn't. If you're in the studio you can set the lights up, push the histogram to the right, and shoot away with these settings. Why in this situation would you take three shots each time - firing the flash three times as much as you need to is bad, especially if you're using battery power!

Here's another example of when ETTR is better than bracketing. When shooting static scenes, e.g. landscapes, I will take an exposure, check the histogram, move it to the right, shoot again check the histogram, thus achieving ETTR, without blown highlights (as each shot is checked). This is technically not bracketing, even if you end up taking the same number of shots, and will result in much more accurate exposures than relying on the camera's metering and firing a bracketed sequence each time.