Um...I didn't know where to post this

I'm curious how much dynanic range the human eye is capable of pulling in (i posed this here because eyes are pretty much like lenses).

Also, this probably a dumb question because I don't know enough about the physics of lenses/sensors, but for example: I'm sitting at work right now. There is a window near me. The room is well lit and I can see everything in it clearly, and at the same time, I can look outside and everything is well-lit by the sun, and I can see both at the same time well-lit. If I were to point a camera in the same direction I'm looking, I will EITHER have a well-lit room and blown out sky, or properly exposed sky and everything inside will be dark. Why am I not able to to point a camera in that direction and have it expose the same way I see it without some sort of post-processing/HDR work? Is it ENTIRELY because no digital cameras can capture the amount of dynamic range our eyes can see? Does it have anything to do with the properties of the lens at all (barring any physical improvements e.g. L series glass)?

Maybe this is just a dumb thing to think about in general. I think too much..

Digital has a lot less range than film and film was never able to match the human eye.

Part of the problem is perceptual because photography can only catch one exposure setting but your eye is always viewing in real time and it adjusts very quickly. Your eye and brain do not have an "Auto Exposure Lock" button that would allow you to adjust to the sunny view out the window and then keep those settings when you look at something indoors, if that makes any sense.

20 stops

The human eye can't do much, it is the human brain, just like lenses don't really determine dynamic range the sensor does.

If you want high dynamic range... medium format black and white film

Many questions like this are answered -=HERE=-

^----I read through the 1st paragraph and I'm already lost. Science and math were never my strong points :P

Not a dumb question, just shows you're learning or at least TRYING to learn

As was said, it's a property of the sensor rather than your lenses. I don't know about the 20 stops for our eyes, but from what I've been able to gather on sensors so far, they pull in between 5-7 or 5-9 stops depending on sources.

The only way to truly get the results you're talking about would be what is called HDR, where you take 3 or more exposures between the highlight areas you want to see and the dark areas that you want to see, then combine all of those images into one. I haven't had much luck in MY attempts at this so far, but several people do manage it.

I one third place in my sixth grade science fair with a paper on the human eye - so I am expert

Vision is our brain's interpretation of the light collected by the eye. Pretty often, we end up tricking our eyes. Think of your vision as the eye sampling different parts of what you see very rapidly. Think of the optic nerve as a very high quality sensor (with one blind spot that gets patched over in software).

But, yeah, 20 stops sounds about right.

Lenses have nearly infinite dynamic range, so this is not a lens question.

We are talking about medium like film, digital sensors vs. the human retina with it's rods and cones,.
The optics in front of them don't do much in the way of restricting the DR.

I don;'t know about the retina handling 20 stops, but the trouble is that with the iris not being "manually controlled" we are constantly stopping down or opening up the "aperture" to adjust to the light without ever knowing it. We could easily perceive far more DR than the retina can handle at one time due to this constant adjustment.

^--- Ooh that's a good point about the iris constantly micro-adjusting.

@snydremark - My attempts at HDR have (for the most part) failed as well.

Thanks for the cool info everyone. I've heard those new PhaseONEs can pull in about 12 stops of dynamic range. That's pretty hardcore.