The idea is about creepy so they mostly work but IMO the first image is too "busy". The sky overwhelms all else.
I like those pics, HDR does them well, no?
Badly done HDR.
HDR shouldn't completely destroy pictures.
Properly done HDR enhances pictures because you can see all the details in pictures that have wildly different exposure requirements. Badly done ones will just look like shit.
Um, what? HDR is great. Low lighting can actually be captured well, rather than washed out darkness from filtering down well-lit scenes, or having to deal with half of it being covered by the graininess of the sensors trying to compete against noise. They can people uber-pale, and plants uber-green, in Downton Abbey, thanks to having much more information when recorded to post-process than otherwise. I can take useable photos, in moderate light, of the poor treatment of a PC, before I go digging into it, and I'm no photographer.
What's not to like?
If someone takes a photograph and makes it look like crap, that's hardly the fault of technology getting better, any more than The Loudness War is.
I see blank white spaces. Maybe they're supposed to be pictures?
The problem with HDR is that too many go overboard in its use and things look weird as a result
The very problem with HDR is that you only ever need to use it, if your composition is shitty.
And with the picture scorpi0 posted, I was hoping that the HDR version would bring back the lost detail in the clipped highlights. Instead it boosted brightness and saturation of the darker stuff, completely ruining the picture.
Know the limitations of the photographic medium, and work with it. HDR is just a gimmick, like selective coloring, digital sepia filters, and whatever else is the current fad.
First you need to know what makes a good photo, from a motif and composition point of view, then you have to find/create such scenes, and the you can start to worry about lighting. A good photog will set up some flash lights to bring out the detail in darker parts of the picture, if it's needed. HDR filters are very much to blame, since they always destroy a picture. Hand-crafted HDR on the other hand (using all the sensor data to get some detail in highlight and shadows) can help to make a better picture.
As for the point of HDR in games: That's kind of inverting the issue, because you can have high in-engine luminance, but your screen has shitty low dynamic range in most cases (and provides just a tiny window into the game world), so by using bloom effects, you can simulate the transition from dark to bright environments, for example. Essentially, you're simulating the reaction of the retina to new lighting effects on-screen. It's a bit rubbish, but if done well it can create a more believable environment, since indoor/outdoor transitions are more believable. It's a much more relevant feature than in photography, where wide-range lighting is going to break your image, no matter what you do.
And it's not the camera even, that's the problem, but rather the medium you use to visualize the image, that's ultimately going to get you. So be aware, that you're photographing for print, or the screen, and just give up on shots where the contrast is too high. They'll look shitty whatever you do.
You know what I"m really sick of? Top 10 anythings. Really, are we incapable of reading anything that is not put in a small list of numbered things for us anymore?