system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why do our eyes handle HDR situations fine (ex. looking own a hall at a bright window) but a camera needs a special mode?
gpt
Your eyes do several things that cameras don't.

1. Your eyes are constantly adjusting the effective "exposure" they're getting in real time. Your pupils are constantly expanding to let in more light and contracting to block it out, depending on what you're looking at moment to moment. Squinting in bright light can take this even further.

2. Your brain does a lot of postprocessing to create the illusion of a constant stream of vision, correcting brightness is only one part of this. Your brain edits out your nose, and the blindspots caused by your optic nerves. It corrects for color, brightness, and contrast. It covers up the blur that happens when you move your eyes or blink. It ignores the fact that only the central ~15 degrees of your vision is sharp and full color, and stitches together an approximation of the rest of your field of view from mental models and your blurry peripheral vision.

3. You actually have 2 different light sensing cell types, that have very different sensitivities, and you automatically switch which ones are dominant. Cones are responsible for full color, sharp, detailed vision, but need a lot of light (relatively) to work. Rods only sense light vs dark, and don't form as sharp of an image, but work with extremely small amounts of light (starlight with no moon for example) and are very good at detecting movement. This is why you can navigate at night, but you can't read: your rods let you see objects, but not details as small as most text.