How We See, How The Camera Sees...

Funny how we take photography for granted - we see a scene and lift our cameras, and take a picture.  Most times it works just fine.  But today saw a scene and when I looked at the results, they were disappointing.  A straight photograph is above, and the sky is all "blown out."

So I took two photographs, one lighter and one darker, and then pasted the darker sky on top of the lighter picture of the water, and this was the result.  It still didn't look like what I saw with my eyes.  That's because our eyes can see a greater brightness range than a camera can record.  So...

So then I used the lighter and darker images, and a piece of software that makes images with a High Dynamic Range - it combines several different exposures together to get a lower contrast image that matches more closely what our eyes see.  The image above, is that image.  Interesting stuff, huh?