I often think about the remarkable differences between film and digital. The first time I visited Bangkok in 1981, I visited the huge reclining Buddha in Wat Pho, and I photographed it with a Mamiya RB 67 medium format film camera on Ektachrome 64. At the time, I loved the pictures and, in fact, they have been published several times over the past many years. However, yesterday I photographed the same statue using HDR, a 14mm ultra wide angle lens (the widest lens I had in 1981 with the Mamiya was equivalent to a 24mm wide angle in the digital format), and knowing I had Photoshop to enhance the colors. What an outrageous difference! The picture above is so much better than the film version, and it's also so much better than I saw with my eyes. In post-processing, I enhanced the reds, added saturation, and the HDR composite took care of the significant contrast in the scene.
What a great time it is to be a photographer.
My camera settings were .6 seconds, f/13, 250 ISO, and I used a tripod which allowed me to use such a low ISO in the dark environment as well as providing the stability for a fairly small lens aperture.