This shot was actually overexposed. If you look at the actual piece of film it doesn't look as nice as this, it looks a bit washed out. If this were a digital shot it would be pretty much ruined. I'd have funny colour halos as the individual colour channels started to clip. If I tried to recover highlights from a RAW shot I could probably hang on to some detail but most of the colour would be starting to go grey.
Film has compression in the way it handles extremes of light. Whilst it handles changes in light level in a linear manner (well, technically, logarithmically) over most of its range it doesn't cut off hard. At the extremes it compresses at an increasing rate which prevents individual colour channels going weird and keeps some level of detail even in extreme areas. Because of this, the overexposed slide I took of a morning skyline scene has yielded one of my most popular images.
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