This is a section of yesterday’s panorama taken at the mouth of the Mousam River behind Parson’s Beach in Kennebunk Maine…not literally a section as in one of the three stitched images…but a section as in a piece of the same view. This time it has received the HDR treatment. For a scene with this kind of sky drama already happening, about the only thing HDR adds (the way I use it) is a bit of detail enhancement in the foreground, some extra detail in the cloud cover, and greens you can see. In a normally exposed image of this scene, the greens would be going toward black (or the sky would be pale and lifeless), especially the evergreens in the distance. They might hold a bit of green, but HDR brings them back up to normal visual levels while preserving the cloud detail.

Canon SX20IS. Three bracketed exposures centered around –2/3EV, assembled and tone-mapped in Photomatix Pro and processed for intensity and clarity in Lightroom.