[thxbb12]

No, we are not. Our eye's DR is pretty low. Just when we look around, the brightness gets regulated by closing and opening the aperture. DR of RAW far outperforms our vision's DR. We have pretty contrasty vision. High DR has low contrast.

 

dbm below explains it better than me. Our brain is just very good at adapting the exposure on the fly which leads to a high DR perception while the eye itself has a DR close to a camera sensor.

 

What you are saying is clashing. HDR is high dynamic range tone mapped into a low dynamic range. That is why it looks unnatural. We can't see a high DR because our vision is contrasty with a low DR. We either perceive a high DR capture as totally bland and not contrasty, or when we adjust the tonal curve, we just see a part of the high DR in a contrasty way and the rest of the DR is lost in perceived white and perceived black.

 



 

This is an example I made to show what increased DR actually looks like. On the left, a normal contrasty DR quite natural (similar to how our vision "works"), of 8 or so stops. On the right what 14 stops look like. The only two ways to make high DR not bland is to put a steep tonal curve in (doing so limits the DR to 8 or so stops again) or by tonal mapping the high DR into low DR (8 stops again).

 

I've seen your example before and I perfectly now what DR is.

The fact is a sensor able to capture very high DR would be extremely useful.

Why do you think people use ND grad filters when shooting landscape at sunset?

Why do people use HDR techniques in the first place?

There are situations where high DR is very valuable and there is no way around it. Try shooting a sunset on the beach where the background is very bright while the foreground being quite dark. Good luck with that.

Currently, the only way to shoot such scenes is to either use ND grad filters or HDR.

If we had sensors able to capture the whole range of information in these situation, we would have the ability to just take one shot and be able to extract the whole information.

That would be awesome, wouldn't you agree?