Why Your Camera Can't See What Your Eyes Do

Photograph a sunset and either the sky blows out white or the ground turns black.

Your eyes see both the bright sky and the dark ground perfectly, so why can't your camera?

The range between the darkest and brightest thing a camera can record at once is called dynamic range. A phone sensor captures only around ten to twelve stops of light. Your eyes, constantly adjusting, take in far more. So the camera cheats. HDR snaps several frames at different exposures: one darkened to save the bright sky, one brightened to rescue the shadows, and others in between. Software then merges the best-lit parts of each frame into a single image where nothing is lost.

It is essentially faking what your eyes and brain do automatically, blending many exposures into one. The camera does in software what your vision does in real time.

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