balancing light with the sky

Rather than take an interesting photo, I have instead taken a photos to illustrate another technical point in balancing light. In the three photos below, the sky through the window is properly exposed to varying degrees.

The first photo illustrates a typical picture out the window, where the sky is in properly exposed, but the window is a mere silhouette
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The second photo shows the interior properly exposed, but in the process the sky is completely blown out. Something to keep in mind is that severly underexposing ANYTHING can turn it black, and severely overexposing anything will turn it white. In this case the blue sky is white.



The third photo uses the flash to balance them out.

This is an example of using the limited range of your flash to your advantage. Ideally I would have taken the flash off the camera and placed it to more evenly light the area, but because of the height of the area and the relative unimportance of this image, I didn't bother.