[masraum]

Originally Posted by GH85Carrera

If you can underexpose it or if you have a high dynamic range option that might do it. Still no substitute for RAW. With RAW you can keep the dark areas from getting too dark and just loosing all detail, and the snow from blowing out.

As I mentioned, it is tricky. Be glad you are the digital world. It is almost impossible to do with slide film, and really hard with negative film. Digital has a simple mode change for most people.

Good luck, and take lots of pictures. Again in the olden days of film it was expensive to shoot a lot, now it is just a battery swap and keep shooting if you buy a large memory card. You can never have too big of a memory card, or too many pictures of your kids.

Even with RAW the highlights can be blown out to the point that no adjustment is going to get them back. The problem with most HDR is that it's an in camera version of image stacking in most cases. So the camera takes 2-3 images and then works some magic to merge them into one image with higher range. I would think that might be a problem with a highly dynamic image. With digital cameras it's usually a balancing act between aesthetics, getting detail where you want it and possibly being willing to lose some detail at one end of the range. I think some sensors have or are coming out that have better range, but I haven't kept up with technology. Maybe the range isn't increasing that much. Maybe it's just the ability to shoot at high ISO without all of the noise that used to be associated with high ISO.

And yes, I always shoot in RAW.