New rule of thumb. The time required to process digital files is at least as long as the duration of the photo shoot, if not double. I’ve been plowing away at yesterday’s assignment for the the University of Washington Tacoma campus (I seem to be on a run of higher educational institutions lately). We met up with an environmental sciences field trip at a creek in a Tacoma park. It’s a bright sunny day. I’m shooting in a forest, with that dreadful, broken light. With transparency film I would have been killed. As it was, my histograms were all shaped like a "U"—clipped shadows, clipped highlights. Geesh, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, so I fall back on my old standby when I don’t know how to expose something—bracket like crazy. Thus the hours attending to each individual file to see which direction I want to save it.
In the RAW conversions I’m making my correction of choice for high contrast situations: drop the exposure bar to corral in the highlights, and raise the brightness, which moves all the values equally upward within the histogram. But anything shot above ISO 100 goes nuts with noise. I’ll see how good Noise Ninja is at fixing that later. I got smart and started using a fill flash which, for some reason, is giving me a magenta cast.
One more day on this assignment. It’s overcast outside. I’ll be so much happier about shooting outdoors today. 
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