I think I like number 2 the best. Not sure why - just something about the simplicity and the balance of the composition.

I know what Zoundz means about 'overdone'. For me it's not a criticism but an inevitable 'feel' that comes with HDR & HDR 'type' landscapes and it's so hard to explain.

In that case no photo looks real, as a camera never portrays what was actually there especially digital camera's that cant deal with a full range of tones.

HDR is designed to more closely mirror the scene, I think people judge HDR on the way a photo should look and not the way the scene looked.

I know where you're coming from and I think I said in another thread that I'd love to see the whole HDR thing discussed as a thread in it's own right.

HDR tries to take every part of a photograph and expose it individually then join all the bits together to create a single perfectly exposed photograph.

However - our eyes don't work like this if they focus on a single point. They will adjust (albeit slowly) to each part of a scene if we move our eyes around it but when looking at a static HDR shot our brains seem to know something strange is going on.

I'm sure the whole HDR thing is for another thread perhaps HDR

I guess at the end of the day there's all manner of ways of artificially 'correcting' an image to widen the range of the exposure. Exposing for 'brighter' sky knowing that some of the shadows and darker foreground will be dark but easily lightened is a 'trick' at the end of the day.

If you look at any photograph then it confuses the brain in the way that you say hdr does. The way we see is geared towards the centre of our field of view and the periphery loosing detail as it moves to the extremity of your vision.

As a landscape has the whole scene in clear detail then the photo does not represent what we would see, as a result the photo looks false to us. Include into this the focal length of the shot, which would need to be 35mm dx or 50mm fx to closely replicate the field of view given by the eye.

So my shots were all at 14mm, wide angle that gives a distorted view to the brain to start with, all the scene is sharp not centrally biased as the eyes would normally view it so is this the reason why the shots look "false" and not the hdr?

The hdr tag allows someone to say, "ah hdr that is why it doesn't look right" But is it? If anything the hdr photo is nearer the true scene than a single exposure would be.

As for the eyes adjusting to the brightness of the scene, this is not strictly accurate your eye can handle a lot more range of f stops than a digital sensor can, so would not need to adjust for each part of the scene in any way that would take time. i was there and I looked at the things shown in my images, that was how it looked i didn't have to wait for my eye to adjust to each part of the scene to take it all in.

The non hdr shot i posted is not that mush different from the hdr one, for you to day that the hdr one looks false and the straight one doesn't. You can only make that judgement if you were there to see how it looked for real and not in a photo.

Some hdr is done over the top so it doesn't hang on to reality, my stuff doesn't and I only use hdr to bring out subtle details not to over cook it as many do.

I have put hdr shots on here that were not clocked as hdr, only when a photo looks "too" real do people look to say it looks false, it doesn't compare to the real scene, it does compared to a single capture from a digital sensor.

Great topic and one certainly worthy of it's own thread.

As I said, I understand what you're saying about the difference between cameras / eyes / exposure / field of vision / human center weighted vision etc and whilst I agree with much of it I think it would still be good to have as another thread.

Far too late for me to reply and be able cover all those points just now.