Expose to the right — ETTR — is the practice of increasing exposure until the histogram is as far right as possible without clipping important highlights. It exploits the mathematical distribution of data in a RAW file: in a 14-bit file, the brightest stop of light receives half of all the available tonal values. Underexposing by one stop discards half the sensor’s information into the shadow region, where noise lives.

Every lens on every sensor has a diffraction limit — the aperture beyond which stopping down no longer increases sharpness but instead decreases it. Light diffracts around the aperture blades, spreading the point spread function across adjacent pixels. On a high-resolution sensor like the R5’s 45-megapixel chip, diffraction becomes measurable at around f/11 and visible at f/16. By f/22, you have traded resolution for depth of field at a poor exchange rate.