situations with many light sources, finding the best camera position to hide the most problematic lights can be like solving a puzzle--move the camera to obscure one light, and another appears. Another option might be to crop the image a little tighter to eliminate light sources near the edge of the frame that are causing lens flare and increasing the overall contrast. Sometimes a compromise of the ideal composition is the only way to photograph a particularly contrasty scene. In other instances, it simply may not be possible to capture the scene you see before you in a single image. In this situation, high dynamic range (HDR) imaging or manually blending exposures in Photoshop can be considered. See Chapter 7 for information on these techniques. Taking the dynamic range of your DSLR or the exposure latitude of your film into consideration will help guide you in determining if a scene can be effectively photographed in a single capture or if it will require multiple exposures to record all of the important detail in the scene. It is necessary to differentiate between important highlights where detail needs to be preserved and highlights that can be allowed to clip or be overexposed. There is no hard rule here; it is a subjective decision made by the photographer at the time of exposure. A surprising amount of highlight detail is contained in a RAW file and can be recovered in postprocessing. However, when there is clipping in all three channels and the sensor sites become fully saturated, there can be no recovery of detail. Each new generation of digital cameras expands the dynamic range that digital photographers have to work with. Early DSLR cameras had a dynamic range of about 10 stops, which had been improved to about 12 stops by 2008. The Nikon D3X has a dynamic range of 13.7 stops, 1 the greatest of any DSLR on the market in late 2009. Black and white film has a similar potential dynamic range. Currently there is no print media that can reproduce the full dynamic range of many night scenes. A quality print will convey a sense of the dynamic range of the image, but it will be compressed to fit the dynamic range of the paper. night photography L i g h t S o u r c e S a n d c o L o r t e m p e r at u r e The color of daylight changes throughout the day depending on the amount of atmosphere that sunlight travels through to reach the Earth, and the amount of atmosphere depends on the elevation of the Sun above the horizon. Because there is only one primary light source during the day, most daylight pictures can be easily color balanced for that light source. However, there are many different types of light sources in our nighttime environment, and each of them has its own color balance, or temperature. Our eyes do a remarkable job of compensating for varying brightness levels because our irises continually expand and contract the pupil based on the brightness of what we see before us. Our brains accommodate for the various color temperatures of streetlights, which we mostly think of as being neutral. When we see different types of lights adjacent to each other, the color differences are more obvious. Photography appears to exaggerate the color of light because film or digital sensors do not adapt to light the way our eyes do. Mixed lighting is one of the things that creates so much potential in night photography, but it can also cause some of the biggest headaches. Digital cameras have a white balance function that is generally set for the 64