system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5 why a picture that I take with my smart phone or even a decent point-and-shoot camera looks NOTHING like what I see with my naked eye.

Generally, I don't get nearly as much content in the photo as I'm trying to capture, which I understand is a limitation of the lenses. But why do the pictures always seem to come out so much darker than it actually is? I can see just fine, why can't the camera? And why is it so hard to capture accurate colors? I've tried to take pictures of various colors in clouds and other sources to use as a reference for other projects later, but the colors seem to come out extremely muted and much less subtle and varied than what I can see with my eye. What's going on?
gpt
Regarding the light issues:
Your eye has a much larger dynamic range than a camera sensor, meaning it can differentiate a much larger range of brightness.  Think of it when you walk into a dark room, you can't see anything, the eyes' dynamic range cannot differentiate objects with so little light. Same goes for when you walk out to sunny outdoors.  The difference is that our eyes can adapt, shifting to the range of what we see. Cameras do that too, but to a more limited extent, with a smaller range, so when something bright and dark is in the same scene, it makes a decision on what it wants to differentiate. 'Better' cameras have a wider range.  

If you were 10:
We actually use similar mechanisms to do so- the iris of the human eye functions as an aperture, opening wider under dark conditions, and smaller when there is a lot of light. This relates to the 'f-stop' on a camera.