So, is it HDR ?

A few years ago HDR or High Dynamic Range enter the vocabulary of photography enthusiasts all over the world. The images yields details traditionally hidden in shadows as well as shadows hidden in highlights and "blown-out" areas.  The digital age has allowed us to manipulate a photograph in a few minutes which historically took hours and even days to create in a darkroom full of chemicals and cardboard cut-outs. The first time I saw an HDR art piece on canvas took my breath away. I had never seen a photograph quite like it before. Then, these art pieces started to morph into what looked like a colorful LSD hallucination. I think they still sold. But, now, it's a trend. Todays cameras have built in HDR software or you can do a plug-in for Photoshop or any other editing software. Cool !  I guess.
But, it's now more like the "special effects" built into Picasa, Photoshop, and every other editor consumers have fun with. So, now a crappy picture looks AWESOME ! YippeeeE!
Well, I'm still impressed with the first HDR images I saw. It didn't look psychedelic at all, but natural.
Our eyes will naturally adjust for light and shadows, all the time. Yet these fresh new HDR photographs were images that resembled what my eyes naturally see.  I feel, there is an art to HDR interpretation of an image. I believe that when I see a subject, my intention is to create an image as I saw it. So, if I'm in an urban area, my eyes adjust for the shadows between the buildings and adjust again when I look up and above the buildings. I see detail in the clouds and sky too.
  I use Lightroom quite a bit for processing my images. I realized that it isn't always necessary to shoot 3 photos of a subject then merge them to get a HDR image. Below are two examples of single shot image with highlights and shadows adjusted within Lightroom.

The image below has a little vignette added to it.