Camera VS Eye

I went to the Adirondacks for a photo search on Wednesday. I first went to Greenwood Creek but the light wasn't great, harsh with bright highlights and deep shadows. I found a few good images before heading north on Rt 3. I stopped for lunch by the gate to Benson Mines and spent a couple of hours after lunch exploring the abandoned site.

The photo above is a prime example of why a "straight" photo can't necessarily represent accurately what is being photographed. The above is a good rendering of what I saw but it took seven bracketed exposures, plus three additional adjustment layers to produce.

The camera sees only a single moment in time at a single exposure. Humans see through our eyes with our brains. The eye is constantly shifting, refocusing, adjusting to variances in light, and the brain assembles all that into an image. Even with modern highly automated cameras a photographer needs to understand the difference between the way the camera sees and the way we see and needs to develop the skills required to bridge the differences.