Your camera's dynamic range

This exercise proved harder to do than I imagined due to two factors - firstly finding a scene that would deliver the brightly reflecting surface and the deep shadow and secondly following the instructions relating to calculating the dynamic range re the calculation, I eventually went to the OCA student website to see if any other students had experienced problems and in fact did come across some postings that indicated at least one person had. That said, the postings did not offer any solution as to how to resolve the question of calculating the dynamic range ( course notes implied you did this using software), so I worked round this in my own way to achieve a result.

This is the scene that I chose for the exercise :

P522 : F3.5 @1/1600  ISO 100 exp.-2step 2mm

As part of the exercise, I turned off the noise reduction in my camera and set the exposure so that there was just no highlight clipping of the white canvas. ISO sensitivity was set at its lowest.

After taking the image, I then set the metering mode to 'Spot' mode to measure the brightness of the white canvas, the dark shadow inside the garage, dark areas on the door and the Labour poster. Interestingly the white came out at f20 and the remaining colours all at f5.6 whether black or red. This would give a dynamic range of 11 stops. I checked the searched on the internet to see if an independent source had checked my camera's dynamic range. A test report on the Shutterstock website  ( http://bit.ly/qWul4v  indicated 11stops.