Perhaps the shutter could be scaled down to about 50 shutters and sensors to take every bit of the frame in the perfect balance of lighting to get rid of this "do I want over exposed sky or under exposed foreground?"
you're talking HDR now - I played a little with that idea this summer, bracketed a few shots, then tried photoshop cS4 HDR automate (forget about it) and a few days ago I installed the trial of Photomatix; result - yawn:
compare to the what I consider "proper" exposure of that view:
yes, more texture in highlights in the above, far more detail in the shadows, but it is like compressed audio - everything is loud, so nothing stands out nor is there any subtle gradiation of anything. If you turn the top image into gray scale, you can barely tell what you are looking at.
I figured a back-lit Rainbow Falls could be improved with HDR, but this turned out like a total cartoon, even though I used the "natural" preset to start
So even if cameras can record all that stuff in the shadows (the falls are based on a single RAW image, not a stacked set of many different exposures), the display of all that within the 8-bit contrast range of our screns just doesn't cut it. I doubt we'll really ever get far beyond what we see now, but cameras will increase their native dynamic range (Nikon D3 is 14 bit, my camera is just 12 bit, we look at 8 bit on the screen), that's really not what film was all about. Slide film especially didn't have anywhere near that contrast range, so it was all about something being more "natural" and analog I guess.
Flash - get the smallest hotshoe flash possible for your body - you won't need the wedding photogapher's mega blaster. Just a tiny filler is all you need to light up those shadows, but not having it built in probably means you'll rarely ever use it.
