Visual Art by Jacob Mann

Sunrise on Cadillac Mountain

This picture is an example what digital technologies can do to save the day. When shooting a sunrise you have to meet a number of challenges. Contrast between rising sun and ground is too high which creates wide dynamic range digital medium or film can't handle.

On the left you can see how the picture originally looked like. The ground is dark because picture is exposed by sky. Traditional way around this problem is to use split density filter, but contrast is so high so it may just not work. Also there is another problem. Foreground looks nice when viewer can see details in it. The rising sun casts sharp shadows and makes visible every detail of the surface but to see it you have to take picture sidewise relative to sun. If you shoot directly against the sun you loose all details in foreground. So I took a picture looking to the right of the rising sun. Cadillac Mountain in Acadia, Maine gives such panoramic view so you can shoot pictures with ocean view looking North, East, West. As you see from the picture below on the left I've got a nice foreground with a lot of details.

And what's interesting - this composite picture is much close to the picture my eyes saw that morning on the Cadillac mountain than any unaltered picture - because dynamic range of the human eye is much wider than digital or film media