Is this a case that the camera does lie or is the human vision system so soficticated that an optometrist needs a degree in the subject to understand it.

Is Chris's shot correctly exposed or did he see it differently ?

Rob

The fact that Chris posted it here with his question " Have been pondering sky corrections on multi-plane landscapes as it seems impossible to get an exposure that does everything in imperfect light " suggests that his camera might not have been able to do justice to the high dynamic range. I was not there so only assume that to be the case.
N.D. filters have been used for ages to assist in this. The camera does not lie but is not as capable as the human eye in dealing with high contrast scenes. If you do not have an N.D. filter then in old fashioned printing terms holding back the sky would be acceptable practice. How you deal with that digitally is another question, which I guess is what Chris is asking.

Don

Right Don

In this pic I was getting a different exposure from each of the 4 planes of the composition. As the most distant was the most unusual (10miles/16km away in fair, but not perfect, light), I exposed for that (f8/500th), which left it and the sky fine, 'as seen' but the nearer ones underexposed and dull. The eye deals with all this effortlessly, unfortunately my camera does not, though possibly i could have left it to average. Hence some doctoring; the exposure using Nikon Edit (simplified version of Nikon Capture) then, as that had washed out the sky, putting a polygon fence on the sky and getting that back as far as I dared.

Rob

I have a cousin who is an optometrist (as was his father) and he assures me that you not only need a degree, but that only 1 university in Germany has a good enough course to give one worth the paper it is written on!!

My point exactly in both cases. It's not as simple as you would like to think.

With the human vision system not only do you have the eye but processing the brain does to interpret the optical signals.

This is the main reason I shoot in Raw.

Raw give you the latitude to correct these problems as no post processing has been carried out within the camera.

All jpegs are processed in the camera after shooting as taken place, so to my mind this is no different to my post processing raw files on my pc. Albeit much later on.

Faced with the situation that Chris found himself in, I would just take the shot with what I considered to be the best exposure.

However when at my pc I would create two Tiff Images, one exposed for the sky and a second exposed for the foreground, then blend the two together.

If the sky is just a lttle overexposed I would just create a new layer and apply a black to white gradient at approx 10%. If you want to inpart more blue into the sky use a suitable shade of blue in place of black.

This is just basic editing within PS.

For anyone just starting out with CS2 I would recomend Deke McClellands "One on One" This takes you through all the various tools with samples to work on and easy to follow text £19 from Amazon.

Harry

So perhaps now we can ask Stephen if he thinks we (who do not have RAW or did not use it) are straying over the boundary?

Not sure if you meant me or not :) Suffice to say that in the majority of cases its my humble opinion that its the end result that counts. We are image creators as well as photographers, so using the tools at our disposal to create the image we have in our minds eye is not straying over boundaries.

I have more of a problem however when there is an intention to decieve and if there is something added or taken out that influences the publics perception of an event then this is morally questionable. I'm thinking particualry now of photo manipulation in news photography and there have been cases fairly recently of photographers being inststantly dismissed from newspapers when it was found that they had manipulated the image to alter our perception. I certainly don't include putting a butterfly on a new background as quite the same thing though :)