Good composition and captured at a perfect time of day.

What is this obsession people seem to have with HRD in the past few years? Photogs - please please PLEASE stop using HDR. It looks bad in almost every case. It looks terrible here, and it ruined an otherwise great shot. 90% of the time, HDR makes your images look like you used the sharpen filter 10 times. I'm actually baffled as to how someone with the eye to line up this shot failed to see that HDR destroyed it.

I'm sure that comes off as a bit harsh, but I think it needs to be said.

I don't want to be offensive here, but my thoughts exactly(see OverDriven). Sorry to say that, but this shouldn't have been uploaded.

No problem :-)

Well...believe or not, the original picture which is made out of 3 exposures doesn't look like HDR at all. Just more brightness in the dark area's.

I made all these changes to the .tiff in Lightroom. More saturation, contrast, brightness, saturation and so on. Afterwards I totally agree the sharpness of this picture is too much.

If you're interested, check out the before/after picture here:

http://i47.tinypic.com/nvqxcz.png

Imho the before picture is wat too dark and doesn't look like at the actual scene.



And I know there is a lot of color that pops out of the picture and an extreme contrast depth, but that is what I like so much about this picture. At that time it really looked like this. Especially because of the sunset and the orange stones.

I partially agree with above comments regarding the surrealism HDR introduces into many images. I find a well dosed amount can enhance the overall image in some cases. Here I must agree, the strong effect of HDR is, well, too much for my taste.

May I also strongly encourage you (and everybody else) to shoot RAW. I know post-processing will allow you to get better balance between shadows and highlights. Sometimes there is no need for HDR, RAW processing will be enough and result in a better balanced more realistic image.