"David Bindle" writes:

I was just reading what Bob Atkins had to say about the "digital" flash mode
on the HP945.
He demonstrates with a mountain scene. It doesn't actually fire the flash at
all, but it lightens up darker parts of the scene. For some purposes, it
looks like a good idea to me.

I wonder, could this technique effectively replace the split neutral density
filters that are commonly used in mountain scenics where the valleys are so
much darker than the white capped mountains? (Of course, only in digital
cameras...)

The problem is most digital cameras have a lot less range than print films do,
between dark and light. Slide films have the same sort of problems, and the
solution is typically the same (expose to avoid burning out the highlights and
bring out shadow detail in post processing). In the most common case of JPEG,
there are only 8 bits (values 0-255) for each color per pixel. With some
cameras by going to the RAW formats, you get a bit more range. I suspect that
in general you will get better results under a photo editor like photoshop or
gimp than with the camera doing the processing.

--
Michael Meissner
email:
http://www.the-meissners.org