Thanks for the insights, very helpful.
A couple of follow up questions:
Is Active D-Lighting relevant to this discussion? I have mine turned of, but wondering if it's an effective and idiot-proof option for high contrast situations.
We can certainly make it relevant!
Active D Lighting is applied to JPG's only, or I suppose if you use Nikon's post-processing software (NX-D, et al) the effect can be applied to RAW files. I'm a little unclear on the details of that since, 1. I shoot RAW exclusively and, 2. I don't use Nikon's post processing software; not that there's anything wrong with it. Fact is, I don't like ADL and that's because in my limited experience with it, I saw it introduce a lot of noise in the shadows; the more strongly it was applied, the more noise I saw in the shadows. Used sparingly, I guess it could help but in my estimation, and this is just me talking here, ADL is solution in search of a problem. If you've decided you want to control your highlights, shadows and midtones, shoot RAW and go nuts; and I say that without taking anything away from those that shoot JPG. I like JPG's just fine. But we also have to be honest and the simple fact is, you gain a huge degree of control over your exposure when you shoot RAW and that's why most of us turn to it. If you shoot JPG I can suggest you try ADL and see what you think. I never want anyone to take what I say for granted.
Second, can you point me to a primer on interpreting and leveraging the in-camera histogram to optimize exposure? Or provide a quick-and-dirty guide on how to do it?
I shore can! One of my favorite tutorials on Histograms comes from Luminious Landscape, a great site full of superb tutorials:
Understanding Histograms. Once you've read that tutorial, and reeeally understand it, move on to:
A Practical Guide to Understanding RGB Histograms by Steve Hoffman.
My understanding of the histogram is rather poor. All I know is you want to avoid having the bell curves way over to the right (underexposed?) or left (overexposed?) or clipped (blown highlights?). However, in practice, I find acceptable images that break these rules. Case in point: I took some moon shots the other day, and noticed that the curves were all smushed to the left on the histogram, and clipped. When I tweaked exposure to get what I thought were acceptable shots, I saw that the histograms hadn't changed very much at all.
The above tutorials should explain all of this. What you are describing is perfectly normal, you just don't know why yet. Once you do, you're going to wonder how you ever got along without understanding histograms. They're freaking awesome.
To your other point about avoiding blown pixels, I've seen whenever I have a light source or a strong reflection thereof in the image, I get the blinking indicator in the "Highlights" screen in playback mode. I'd imagine if I dialed down exposure to avoid blown pixels, then the rest of the image would underexposed. Is that correct or am I missing something?
You're perfectly on track here. To protect the highlights the shadow regions of a shot will frequently be underexposed to some degree. To fix this the shadows are lifted in post-processing. Now if the dynamic range is way high, this is going to be tough... Shooting a black cat sitting on a pristine white snow bank under a clear sky with full sun is going to challenge just about any DSLR currently on the market which is where learning to do HDR photography comes into play, but... Doing HDR requires multiple shots and I'm limiting this discussion to single-frame exposures. So, back to your question... Yes, to protect the highlights you shoot them as close to the edge of your histogram as you can, without blowing out any pixels (ETTR). This will bring the shadows up
as much as possible, while at the same time keeping the highlights as high as possible (no blowouts allowd) and the final balancing is performed in post-processing where it's almost always better to pull something down (subtract from what is already there) than it is to try and add something that is not already there. I'm not sure that last little bit makes sense but hopefully you're catching my drift.
.....
But sincerely, much appreciated!