"The most important attribute a photographer can have is enthusiasm." - 365 Project, Day 351

Just like everything on this planet, you know what you want more than anybody else.  In terms of camera performance, I've known this for a wee while now, and today was a perfect example.  I was trying to get a shot of something and decided to get the Peace Tower.  This was probably the only shot I took that had an interesting sky, as the whole day was very bland.  Nothing about nature was helping my in my photography.

First, here's my shot for today.

I tried taking in-camera HDR shot with my Canon S100.  This is not that shot.  This is a RAW I edited to look fake-ish HDR.  I find it looks better than the HDR, which looked strangely similar to the standard non-edited version of this picture here.  This shot was taken at ISO 80, shutter speed 1/250th of a second at f/8.0.  I boosted the contrast and clarity to max levels, which bought out most of the detail in the final image. I simply had to tweak the shadows and highlights sliders to bring out the most detail possible.  This is the end result.

At night, when highlights and shadows are very obvious, in-camera HDR works fine, but during the day when the range is a bit more subtle, the camera struggles.  Here's the HDR shot the S100 produced.

It's a bit blurry, but that's my own fault, and that's not the point of showing you the shot.  The point is to show how flat it looks compared to my edit of the raw shot.  The HDR in definitely a bit bright, but you can see more detail and definition in the sky and especially in the snow in my edit.  The parliament building is a bit more clear in the HDR shot, but there's as much detail in both shots, if you decide to look closely.  Besides, I like the dramatic look of my own edit over what the the camera did.

Just as a comparison, as well, here's my original shot without any editing.  I took the same RAW file and simply converted it to JPEG without any editing done.

As you can see, there's not much difference between the HDR and normal shots.  The HDR may have a tiny bit more detail in the parliament building but not much.  The sky and snow are basically the same, as well.

I'll have to wait until night to take in-camera HDR shots with this camera.  You can get nice shots with that mode, but the range has to be very big.  More subtle scenes won't get that same look, unless you want a more standard look to it.  Again, most compact cameras are very good and will give great picture quality.  They'll do the best job they can do, but it may not be what you want.

I hope you liked this, and hopefully there will be three pictures tomorrow.