I'm always amazed at a lot of different stuff... as mentioned it's cool about how one person perceives something vs another person's perception of the same thing... This post is more about our own individual differences in what it is that we actually see vs what we actually perceive that we saw.
Our eyes are simply amazing in and of themselves. Technically speaking of course... They dynamically adjust to the things we are focusing on. When we look at a dark area, the pupil opens up to let in more light so we can see more detail, in brighter areas, when we change are area of focus, it closes down. Then our brains kick into gear and combine both into an almost single perception of the whole view so we can see, I probably should say perceive again, the details in both the brighter and darker areas as a whole.
Last nights shots I took of the after sunset view make a good example of this... only in several shots instead of one whole perceived image as I was "seeing". When I first took a shot of the scene in order to determine what exposure I was going to use... I got the exposure for the lower part of the scene almost exactly as I was seeing it... the trees, houses and the sky just over them were almost exactly as I was seeing them in the shot on the right side of the image I combined below. The problem was that the clouds in the sky almost didn't show up at all even though that is what I was perceiving. So I adjusted the exposure for the sky until the clouds appeared how I wanted them ( since they were my real focus ) as seen on the left side of the pic below... doing that ended up with the trees and houses being brightly lit by the street light ( that yellow sodium glow in the bottom of the final shot I used ) and the sky just above the tree's was almost daylight bright.
I image there is probably a method that could have combined both into one shot ( like taking an HDR shot, to get the higher dynamic range of both )... Instead, I just selected the one that I was more focused on... the one where the clouds were showing more like I saw and liked and didn't worry about the lower more over exposed areas.
Our eyes are simply amazing in and of themselves. Technically speaking of course... They dynamically adjust to the things we are focusing on. When we look at a dark area, the pupil opens up to let in more light so we can see more detail, in brighter areas, when we change are area of focus, it closes down. Then our brains kick into gear and combine both into an almost single perception of the whole view so we can see, I probably should say perceive again, the details in both the brighter and darker areas as a whole.
Last nights shots I took of the after sunset view make a good example of this... only in several shots instead of one whole perceived image as I was "seeing". When I first took a shot of the scene in order to determine what exposure I was going to use... I got the exposure for the lower part of the scene almost exactly as I was seeing it... the trees, houses and the sky just over them were almost exactly as I was seeing them in the shot on the right side of the image I combined below. The problem was that the clouds in the sky almost didn't show up at all even though that is what I was perceiving. So I adjusted the exposure for the sky until the clouds appeared how I wanted them ( since they were my real focus ) as seen on the left side of the pic below... doing that ended up with the trees and houses being brightly lit by the street light ( that yellow sodium glow in the bottom of the final shot I used ) and the sky just above the tree's was almost daylight bright.
I image there is probably a method that could have combined both into one shot ( like taking an HDR shot, to get the higher dynamic range of both )... Instead, I just selected the one that I was more focused on... the one where the clouds were showing more like I saw and liked and didn't worry about the lower more over exposed areas.
I wanna see more please. How many snakes ya gots left ? 
