iPhone High Dynamic Range Photograph

High Dynamic Range Image

I took the above photograph to report a problem with the street lighting outside our apartment and accidentally created a good demonstration of the iPhone High Dynamic Range capability.  The image has a very wide range of light levels from the bright light of the main entrance to the black of the night sky.  Camera sensors have to set a single exposure setting across the whole of the image and cannot cope with the whole range from black to white.

The photograph displays the bright lights of the entrance, the mid tones on the grass, the clouds with a tree in silhouette and the night sky including a couple of stars.

To create this, the iPhone has taken 3 images at different exposure lengths and then combined them to create a single photograph.  When taking the photograph, crosshairs appears with a caption telling you to "keep steady".

I am not sure if this is a new update to the camera software or capability that has been there all along.