@ Wheezy, keep having fun with your HDR'ing. It's loads of fun!
@Doylem, I disagree that HDR is the flavor of the month fad in photography. The technique has been around for several years now, and still growing in popularity. Of course, for every great HDR out there on the net or on Flickr, there is also a lousy one, but that's just the way of the universe.
Part of my enthusiasm for HDR stems not solely from the artistic and creative uses of HDR, but also the very practical uses of HDR also. It works fantastic for highlighting architectural details - as you know from the urban cityscape photos. For instance, a photo I took back in October while I was running around downtown Kansas City trying to renew my car tags;
Exhibit A - boring, crappy, thoroughly unremarkable:
Exhibit B - same capture but clone stamped, leveled, cropped, and of course a proper dosage of HDR:
I've already managed to sell a 20X30 print of the edited HDR version. My theory on this being that the more minute art deco architectural details are brought out to shine because of the HDR treatment. I really do believe that HDR has just as much practical and real world use as it does for artistic use.
I think I pretty much agree with the rest of your post - the first ingredient for interesting photography is the compositional and artistic "eye" of the photographer himself or herself, and I believe everyone posting in this thread has that in spades, albeit in widely divergent styles, of course.
And indeed there are plenty of times when HDR just won't work, I've been through it firsthand.
@Clix Pix - I'm glad you are reasonable about it. I can respect people who aren't into a lot of computer processing; obviously I love lots of post processing, and get my jollies from it most frequently. HDR might not be as useful for your angle of nature/bird photography that you have posted.
The people who irritatate me (none in this thread yet) are the ones who are like "Oh Noes!!1 U photoshopped that! U Looze!!1" Within the cobweb-infested innards of these peoples' minds, it is thought that "photoshop" is a dirty word and that digital enhancement in any form is a sacrilegious blaspheme - neverminding the fact that many functions in the Photoshop software are actually based on dark room film methods.
And, everyone please be wary of those who employ the word "photoshop" as some sort of generalized verb; it is safe to assume that those people are completely uninformed and ignorant about digital photography, and thus you can not pay any attention to what they say. Not talking about anyone here at Macrumors, but on a couple other sites I've posted photos in the past.
</end diatribe>
