Often a scene that looked appealing to our eyes is photographed in a completely unrepresentative way, with a whitish, overexposed sky, black gaps in place of shadows, and surrealistic color shades. What’s the reason? Why can’t the camera simply take the scene as it is? Actually, it tries. By virtue of its modest capabilities. The problem is that we ourselves never see the world as it really is. Our eyes and brains do a tremendous amount of work so that we can admire the reality around us. The camera can’t do that, and you have to think for it, perform non-obvious and not always natural manipulations to get images that look natural.
Central and peripheral vision
The field of vision receptive to detail is very small – about three degrees. You’ll see this if you linger your gaze on any letter in this text and try to look at the surrounding letters without moving your eyes. As you move away from the center, you rapidly lose the ability to distinguish small details. Peripheral vision is very sensitive to movement, but not to detail. To obtain a detailed image in the brain, the eye constantly scans the scene, every moment sending the brain information about its individual fragments, from which, after their individual processing, a complete picture is formed. The camera sketches the whole scene as it is, not caring that different fragments of the scene have different semantic significance, need different color and brightness corrections, and, in fact, should be photographed quite differently at all. Hence all the problems.
Dynamic Range
When the eye looks at light or dark parts of a scene, the pupil changes its diameter, narrowing when looking at bright objects and widening when looking at shadows, thus adjusting the amount of light that reaches the retina. In addition, retinal receptors are able to vary their sensitivity to light depending on its intensity. As a result, we can distinguish details in both light and shade, adapting to high contrast conditions. The camera exposes the whole scene with constant, preset aperture, shutter speed and ISO values, and is therefore not able to capture the difference in the degree of light in a high-contrast scene. The solution is this: avoid scenes where the contrast is not within your camera’s dynamic range. If the contrast is high, try to soften it by using a reflector or fill-in flash to slightly illuminate the shadows. If you can’t influence the lighting, and have to sacrifice either light or dark areas of the scene – sacrifice the shadows. We are more attuned to the perception of detail in the light, and therefore black shadows look much less unnatural than flat whitewashed lights.