High contrast lighting can be problematic for digital cameras because the sensor simply can’t record the contrast range visible to the human eye
So where we might see detail in shadow and highlight areas on a bright sunny day, the camera may clip them to pure black and highlight areas to pure white.
The default settings for Camera Raw often fool us into thinking less detail is present than is actually the case. By dropping the Blacks and Contrast sliders and pushing up Shadow, we can often restore an image to better simulate the contrast range the eye was able to perceive.