wooded sunset

An interesting shot. The sun ray could be a powerful torch. In fact it looks more like a torch than the sun which you'd expect to have the ability to penetrate much further into the background.

Is this lack of penetration simply a function of the quality of how film sees as opposed to the human eye or was this a printing manipulation?

I confess that this difference between the eye and film was something I had given little thought to until becoming interested in photography.

Best example I have seen is a R Hicks shot of a lady standing by cliff in night light. At a 15 min exposure it looks like a strange form of daylight with good detail but the eye acts more like a screen which is constantly "refreshed" and never sees such detail. To the eye the scene would look as dark after 15 mins as after 15 secs.

pentaxuser