Question: I sometimes find I want to photograph a room showing the view outside the window. This is tricky — either you adjust the shutter speed so that the the window is so bright you can see no detail, or the room looks very dark and gloomy. 

Are there any techniques I can use to get the best photo showing as much as possible of both room and view? 

My camera is a Sony Nex3, and for this sort of thing I usually use it with an elderly Pentax-M 1:2.8 / 28mm manual focus lens with an adaptor, although I would be prepared to buy another (cheap manual!) lens.

Answer: 
Any camera is going to struggle with the dynamic range of that sort of situation. Very hard to get the room and the outside both exposed reasonably at the same time. With enough flash power you can do it by flooding the room with light I suppose.

But the easier way is to use a tripod and take two exposures, one for the inside and one for out, and blend them together in your editing tool. I think it's best if you leave the outside exposure pretty bright, otherwise it looks fake.

You can use HDR, but if you have a few windows that are easy to mask, I'd just blend two exposures manually.

Simple example:

Light exposure for the room

![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/nDjCs.jpg)

Dark exposure for the outside

![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ir8JI.jpg)

Blended exposure

![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/KEX6u.jpg)
A very easy one: Wait until dusk or dawn to take the photo.