By accident I  discovered  the limits of the dynamic range on my Sony A7 R111 digital camera  whilst I was on a recent  landscape photo session in Waitpinga in South Australia  late this summer (mid-February).   

Even though I was photographing in the early morning light,  the camera could not cope with the dynamic range between the deep  shadows at the base of the cliffs and the highlights of the sun in the clouds. Using Lightroom 6  I was able to recover the detail at the base of the cliffs in post processing, but not in the highlights. 

An example: 

The pictures  that I made when I was at the foot of the cliffs that morning were similar, only the highlights were even more burnt out. I did not realize this had happened  until I uploaded the digital files onto the computer's hard disc  and looked at the images on the computer screen. I eventually deleted these. I  had to admit  to being  somewhat surprised. Taken back actually. 

I am low tech as I use the  digital camera as if it were a film camera, given the Leica M lens on it. The menu has been set up for manual,   I  don't check the histogram when exposing and I never check the images in the back screen after taking a photo. I was  aware though,  that the Sony default colour saturation was on the high side (too intense) when compared to film,  so I would normally de-saturate a photo. 

 I'm a luddite and to be honest I never thought about the limits of dynamic range  as I had assumed that the Sony's dynamic range capabilities  would be  able to  handle situations like this. The A7 R111 has 15 stops of dynamic range and I'd never previously encountered a situation where the highlights were blown out. I had encountered blown out  highlights  using an old film camera---a Linhof Technika 70  with slow b+w film. 

Presumably, the only way that I can work within these dynamic range limits in the late summer (ie., mid-February ) to  avoid the  blownout highlights  is to photograph just after sunrise,  when the early morning  light is not so strong.  That is about 20 minutes difference. 

Update

I went back the following morning on a poodlewalk with Kayla,  and re-photographed the same section of the coastal landscape a bit earlier in the morning.  There was extensive cloud cover,  but the  results were similar (blown highlights), though not as bad.  

It was a similar situation with the  photos that were made at the base of the cliff, where I was trying  to represent the early morning light on the cliff face. I only just made it down to the base of the cliffs before the light disappeared.  The result:  great detail in the shadow area of the picture but blown highlights as can be seen here: