Pair o' Sneaks

I think I'm seeing light more. Light coming from a low angle tends to look very nice. I tried to capture this as a patch of light shown on my sneakers. My first attempt was a tad disappointing. There was too wide a dynamic range. That is, the shadows too dark, and the brights too bright. The photo looked too harsh. Now, many photographers would make an HDR, or high dynamic range image by taking a series of exposures and then combining them using some program to create an image with a high dynamic range. I've done this before. It's fine and you have a lot of control and can get some great results. But in this case I just popped up the tiny built in flash, adjusted the FE compensation (set the flash to not be as bright) and fired off this shot. The flash threw just enough light into the shadows to brighten them up a bit, so they're not totally black. Thus compressing the tonal range.