138:365 Shadows 8.7.10

an alpaca in the shade and some detail in the sky.

Here's the thing about digital cameras, they can't really capture everything we see. Even the best ones pale in comparison to the human eye. Digital cameras have a notoriously narrow range of exposure (or "dynamic range" for those who speak tech talk). Basically, this means that if you are looking at a scene with a large contrast between the bright areas (highlights) and the dark areas (shadows), you can't properly expose (see) both at the same time.

This is the problem that arises when you are trying to shoot outside on a sunny day. There are bright areas in the photo, usually the sky, and then there are dark areas, or the harsh shadows cast in bright sun. Your eyes can see both at the same time, but the camera can't. You have to make a choice. Do I expose the photo for the highlights or for the shadows? If you choose one, you usually lose detail in the other. This photo is a great example of that bright sunny day... but wait, what's that you say? You see details in the shadows and the highlights? Well, that's the magic of post-processing. What comes out of the camera looks like blah, the sky is all white and the shade is too dark, but what you can do with the information hidden in the zeros and ones is quite remarkable. When you play around with the little sliders in Adobe Lightroom and find those details in the highlights and shadows that you thought had disappeared, you can massage the pixels into showing us something close to what our eyes can see. Unfortunately it takes a good amount of time on the computer to coax out these details, whereas our eyes do it instantaneously.

The funny thing is that most people will look at a photo like this and say "that's not real, they did something to it in photoshop." And while that is true, the intention for doing this was to be able to bring it back to reality - to show the full dynamic range of the scene, or simply, show what our eyes see. So the next time you are squinting on a sunny day, be thankful that you can see the bright blue in the sky as well as the girl under the umbrella laying on the beach. If your eyes were like a digital camera, you might have to choose which one to see (I'd go with the latter...).