For me, the brighter picture is overexposed on the house and sky; the
darker one is underexposed in the shadow detail. Is this a question
of the limited dynamic range of the camera?
This comment is interesting to me. Maybe I'm wrong about this, but I don't think I've ever used a DSLR that couldn't deliver greater dynamic range than Velvia, or even Provia. It seems to me that with the advent of digital manipulation -- or, more specifically, the shadow/highlight tool in Photoshop and then HDR -- came a bias toward the middle, a sense that every detail of every shadow or highlight must be displayed.
And with the advent of cameras that display histograms, there seems to have come a quest for "the perfect histogram," a gently sloping bell curve with a peak in the middle (or wherever one "favors") and ends that taper off just short of each edge of the rectangle. Never mind looking at the scene in question, deciding what the subject is, and determining how best to emphasize the subject and convey the message... instead, point and shoot, review the histogram, and adjust exposure to push the curve around the rectangle so that "every detail" is captured.
If we place our emphasis on milking every last detail out of a scene, are we losing some of our ability to communicate what is important about the scene?
True that if maximum detail is captured, then one can always decide in post what to emphasize and what to minimize, but shouldn't we have some idea of what we're emphasizing and minimizing when we compose an image in the first place?
It reminds me a bit of when people (self included at one time, with occasional and sometime purposeful relapses) discover the saturation tool and go wild, producing impossibly deep green foliage, poster-blue skies, and vistas of red and yellow that scream, "Look at me, I'm a phony image you'll never see in real life!"
Or when people read that all digital images need sharpening and, determined that every image they process must be sharp enough to make your eyes bleed, whip out the USM tool and oversharpen a picture to the point that hair, eyelashes, or other fine details are a pixellated mess.
Will FDR (fake dynamic resolution) become the next cliche of digital photography?
