One of the main reasons that I sold off my previous small sensor cameras was blown highlights.  I’m sure all of you have seen them.  It is an unfortunate characteristic of small sensors.  The bright areas are just white blobs with no details and there is little you can do about it with the cheaper small cameras.  Since I recently purchased a Panasonic LX7 camera, which has a small sensor, I decided I needed to see how bad it was with highlights.

The above picture was taken looking straight into the sun.  It was cloudy but I couldn’t make out the sun … all I could see with my naked eye was a very bright large white blob.  I just took this one picture and it hasn’t been tweaked in LR.  It was taken in raw format and only developed with standard LR settings.  What are different are the LX7 controls.

The LX7 is an amazing little camera with a full set of controls.  In addition, it has a built-in neutral density (ND) filter.  I turned on the filter and shifted the exposure to -3.  I then took one picture in the program mode at a zoom of 11.8mm.    The camera chose ISO 80, f/5.0, 1/1600 sec.  The above picture is what I got.  It has no blown highlights!

Those settings didn’t increase the dynamic range and they did shift the lighting.  If you wanted to get a picture of how the sky actually looked, you wouldn’t take it this way; but it can create some interesting ways to get other types of pictures.