The answer to that question, at least in photography subjective. I just started reading David duChemin‘s latest masterpiece, “Vision & Voice”, in which David talks about hearing this question from someone in the audience while he and fellow photographer Matt Brandon were lecturing at the Himalaya Club in New Dehli, India. David’s bottom line answer is: “it looked like [that] to me.” Trust me when I tell you that I have REALLY simplified his response, which he delivered so much more eloquently than I could hope to do, or even dare to try. David discussed the limitations of one of our primary tools in photography, the camera, in bringing our “vision” to the print, and effectively argues for the legitimacy of using a postcapture tool (Lightroom 3, for example), to coax from the digital negative the vision our camera (given its limitations) cannot deliver alone. It will take time for me to digest David’s wisdom, but it is a journey I look forward to completing (and likely repeating after completing it the first time). Based on my reading of the first several chapters of the book, as well as a thumb-through of the rest of the work, I highly recommend it!

So, which one of these two photographs looks better to you, they way my camera and Photomatix Pro delivered it to me (second image), or the way I “saw” it when I was on the scene (and how I tried to convey my vision to you)?

Better like this? (This is how I "saw" it and how I want to show it to you!)

...or like this? (This is how my camera captured the scene & how Photomatix Pro rendered it!)