I know there's problem here, I've been there plenty, plenty, plenty...

Fortunately, lots of smarter people than I have come up with ingenious ways to keep this from happening. Before capture, landscape photographers use graduated neutral density filters made popular by the likes of Galen Rowell. They are simple filters with lighter and darker sections--perferrably compatible with a filter holder that allows adjusting. The dark sections hold back the highlights--usually the bright sky for landscape photographers--allowing the entire scene to be captured with a single exposure within the dynamic range of the sensor. Pretty awesome stuff. But, there's limits. When you had jagged, non-uniform bright to dark sections, you sometimes developed tell-tale signs you were using a filter. Remember, it's always every photographer's goal to keep his viewers wondering "how'd he do that?" To get past this, with that advent of the digital revolution, another technique was developed for digital photographers. I've written a lengthy article here that describes this technique.

This is one of many techniques out there doing the same thing--combining several digital captures made at different exposures to expand the dynamic range of your medium. Except for the extra time spent on the computer, these techniques are very powerful. With practice, you can coax details out of the lightest lights, and darkest darks making images that would otherwise only exsist in your mind's eye. Remember, these techniques are all about combining files made with different exposure settings. This works great in the landscape/static setting. But, what about the more active, action oriented subject? Are you out of luck? Not quite, which is the whole point of this article.

Let's start with a little point right off the bat when it comes to me and coaxing the most out of my digital files--shoot raw format. Shooting raw the only way you can use the basic sensor information and post process it with the latest and greatest raw processor to get digital files with the greatest potential. When a high end digital camera captures an image, there's a whole lot of info captured in the resutling digital file. Raw processing tweaks it and manipulates it to bring out the best the digital file can be. But is it?

It's my experience with a little effort, you can coax even more out of your files than what your raw processor can produce. This is most obvious in high dynamic range situations where the brightest whites and darkest darks are so far apart from each other. Here's the technique in a nut shell--from a single raw file, process a Photoshop file that retains the highlights and process another that retains details in the shadows. Then combine them together just as if they were separate captures using the techniques I outlined in my other article. But wait, you're wondering how come I can retain highlights processing the file one way while loosing it processing it another? I have no idea. All I know is if you take take a file that's borderline loosing highlights, you can recover more than processing it with a middle of the road exposure setting. Try it, you'll see what I mean.

Let's do an example. In Figure 1. we have a several month old Pronghorn calf that's got some serious sidelighting going on. The situation is this little guy was photographed at Custer State Park in South Dakota just past sunrise on a cloudless morning. The light was intense as you can see here. Notice the huge difference between his back in the shadows compared to his face--let alone the brightest parts. If you check just under his chin, part of his white fur is blown out completely white. Overall, I think this is an acceptable image but think I can do just a bit better.

Now for the technique.