This image was taken with an iPhone 4s, single image, no HDR, no edit, no nothing. I emailed it to myself, used PS to reduce the size to fit the forum and posted it.
The sky is not blown, the can is not blown, the shadows are well managed. This is all because of the time of day - later afternoon, bordering on the golden hour. Just reiterates the idea that capturing a scene means being able to acquire the light in the scene. You can use HDR to try to capture it all and compress it, you can use fill flash to try to compress the tonal range and bring the shadows up to the mid tones, you can wait until nature and physics present you with the right mix of direct and ambient fill for your device.
Pretty cool. And the iPhone actually has bokeh. I would probably do some minor levels or curves and some final sharpening, but I left the image alone for this musing.
This kind of scene and scene lighting sometimes appears like it may require HDR, and, if presented as HDR, sometimes results in folks commenting that the scene isn't HDR. Crazy thing is, a half hour earlier I could not have taken this image with this result.
kirk
