The interesting image below was shot by Karen Gross while on a trip to Mexico in September of 2010. It’s an early morning sunrise view from the balcony of a condo overlooking the old silver mining town of Taxco de Alarcón (de Alarcón is in honor of writer Juan Ruiz de Alarcon who was a native of the town), about a 2.5 hour drive to the south of Mexico City, in the state of Guerrero. This eastern sunrise view shows the
architecturally baroque styled Parroquia de Santa Prisa on the right, known also as the Church of the Rose-colored Stone, with the Cerro de Huixteco Mts in the background, tile rooftops and alley walkways below.

Unfortunately for Karen, a camera is not capable of capturing a scene with as much dynamic range as presented itself that morning. There’s such a great difference in the brightness of the sky and the darkness of the shadowed village that either the former is going to be overexposed with a loss of detail or the latter will consist of blocked shadow areas. The fact that her Kodak C182 camera has a very small sensor and produces only the compressed jpeg format only added to the problem. Karen edited the shot extensively in a attempt to recover the loss detail in the shadows, which did improve it somewhat, but the luminous and color noise became very evident. If you want to see a good example of just exactly what this noise looks like, click here for a cropped version of the photo. The only real solution is to go back to Taxco de Alarcón and bracket the shot, capturing various levels of exposure. This is a perfect scene to practice your High Dynamic Range Photography skills.