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)
You've basically got three choices in such a situation: 

* Use artificial light to bring the interior brightness up enough that the entire scene is within your camera's dynamic range. Anything from on-camera flash to multiple strobes.
* Take multiple images and combine them using one of several methods for compressing dynamic range. This could range from HDR with or without heavy tone mapping, to Exposure Fusion, to combining elements of multiple exposures by hand in Photoshop.
* Use a combination of both.

There has been some debate about which approach yields the best results. Which you choose will depend on what you want your final image to look like.

[This video](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5ea1Kw0_pg), this [article](http://fstoppers.com/how-real-estate-architectural-photography-mike-kelley), and [this Flickr discussion](http://www.flickr.com/groups/photographyforrealestate/discuss/72157615088733712/#comment72157615015541905) examine in detail what the different methods will wind up looking like.