The HDR debate goes on - how much is too much?

Reading through another debate on the HDR flickrgroup - I had to laugh - throughout history fear of change and anything new has always been prevalent.

Portrait painters thought photography wasn't real portrait work because a camera was used.

Fast forward to a generation of film photographers calling DSLR users "computer operators." I still get told I'm not doing photography. They may be right, but that has little to do with it being a digital camera.

Then what is and isn't an HDR. These type of debates will go on as long as someone is afraid of anything different.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If it doesn't look good to you, go on to the next one.

Tonemapping is a dial we use to render an HDR so it can be viewed on an RGB monitor. How high and far we turn that dial is based on what looks good to the person tonemapping the image.

For those who want to rigidly define what is or isn't ... or how far you can turn the above dial, please go lock yourself in that cage and enjoy it.

Meanwhile if I see something I enjoy seeing, the last thing I'm going to do is relegate it to someone's defined subgroup.

I don't like some of my own HDR's but I post them to get feedback on them. The reviews have been mixed and thanks to a few I've made some improvements I believe in what I do.

Lastly someone who 'hates HDR's" is going to anyway no matter which one he or she is looking at. That's the thing about opinions - everyone has one - and they DO vary.

Enjoy what you see, life's too short not to.

My next posts will be on hand held tips and then tonemapping and or processing and may be broken into parts to keep it from being too lengthy.

The image at the start of this post was hand held using the car lot's fence as a pivot.