Ugh, stupid light coverage

[Snapper123]

Hey guys, I just went on a small photography practice shoot for some indoor christmas lights, and I am ticked off. I'm not sure how different it is with film, but I know that digital technology plain sucks when taking shots of lights. The light sources all are just a bit too strong, the surrounding areas are justva bit too dim, and it's always uglt no matter how many exposure abd picture style experiments I try. Now, I used the exposure bracketing to get some shots that I'll be able to blend together in post, but I wish I had the 60D as I believe it has the bracketing edit tool built in, and I'd love to see the results first hand on the camera so that I know for sure what I'm getting right and wrong.

But anyway, even with that being a possibility, I still find it so silly that theses cameras are pretty awful at covering differences in light. Are there any filters at all that help with dimming electric light sources just a bit? Even a little could fricken help. It's also frustrating because with video, you just can blend things together to cover three different versions of the same scene; I'm very interested in solving this problem externally somehow. Any tips, ideas, or techniques?

 

[PerroneFord]

These are bargain basement cameras. They lack so many of the features of even moderately professional cameras. They have quite poor dynamic range, hardly better than a good miniDV camera. If you want to get serious dynamic range, you've got to step up and get a real camera. You're just not going to find it with these cameras. No sense complaining when we're paying 1/5 to 1/10 what a good camera would cost.