Yes, TT! That's one of the places I'd like this mini-tutorial to go. Everything is relatively easy when the scene starts out as low contrast, and you just have to fit it into the capability of the media. When BOTH the low end and the high end are clipped, things get more difficult. With traditional B&W wet darkroom, you could expose for the shadows, and then change the development time to pick up a few more highlights. With digital cameras, there may be some things you can do with setting the black points and white points. I need to investigate this. At the extreme, your suggestion of combining multiple exposures is something which is practical to do. If you find some good links about this, please post them. [I just read an article today, BTW, where Fuji is coming out with a high sensitivity CCD array sandwitched with a low sensitivity array. It should do exactly this! In a few more years folks may wonder why photographers spent so much time on something foolproof like exposure!]