HDR Photography: gimmick or reality?

High Dynamic Range photography. This is far from a cutting edge
technique but it's certainly newer than most of the processes we engage
in and it seems to be a popular alternative process now that software
has made the process of registration easier.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/hdr/

Basically, people shoot a bunch of frames of the same scene with varying
exposures both under and over. Some artists are using tens of frames
exposed at 1/3 stop intervals, some are using just three.
Either way, I see HDR (when executed well) as a means to better
demonstrate the acuity of the human eye. In my opinion, well done HDR
images show what we really see as opposed to what the camera sees.

As somebody who works in the confines of 2 stops of latitude (if I'm
lucky) on a Becquerel Daguerreotype, I find this to be the holy grail.
Yummy!

Discuss...

-Jonathan

-- 
http://photographs.danforthsource.com