Alv.

@Beijinger: I’m not sure — I guess there should be a line between what we call a photograph and what we call digital artwork, but to me one doesn’t have more value than the other.

As I hope can be seen in any HDR images I produce, I really like HDR that strives for realism over surrealism. Using any of the pictures above as a point in case, they generally better reflect the image I saw when I took the photo than the non-HDR images I took at the same time/place. That really is what appeals to me about HDR.

Stuck in Customs was mentioned above, Trey Ratcliff exemplifies this principle and I challenge anyone to check out his portfolio and not be astounded.

While I love HDR images, I believe there should be far between em. For me they otherwise get too plasticy and candyish. I like the occasional HDR picture (there are tons of great ones) but not all the time.

I may be a bore, but I like pics with little or no photoshopping the most. With HDR you can make a lot of bad pictures seem better (which is both good and bad). Maybe I just like the challenge of shooting pictures without after-editing more.

While HDR does look stunning, I can’t see it as a superior style of photography, just a different one.

There’s a university in Dalian that offers an MA in photography as a joint course with a UK university (and is branded by the UK university). Hanging around with some of the students there I noticed that while each photographer had a distinct style, much of the course was dedicated to getting them to turn that style into a personality, but not be bonded by it. In their assignments, some weeks they had to use medium format, sometimes they had to extract a frame from a video from a moving vehicle, some weeks it was old fashioned painting. An interesting course and approach (well, as observed by a complete novice like me).

Forgot to ask you the other day, did you pick up a circular polarizer for your new camera? I love mine. Works well for the kind of sky shots you had here.