I happened to glance out the window about an hour ago and I caught a very blue looking dusk with an almost full moon. It helps that the bridges are blue and that the view contains some water – the whole thing just looked like it had been washed in blue:

Shot with a Canon 50D and the Sigma 30mm f/1.4 at ISO 100 f/2.5

This is a 3 exposure shot tonemapped with Photomatix. The colour was not augmented in any way (i.e., no blue tones added or bumped in post-processing).

I originally thought it would be good to do this as an iPhone HDR comparison shot, but it’s just not a fair comparison. I’ll post the iPhone shot anyway, but the fact is, as useful as it sometimes is to get the extra light in shots with my iPhone, there are very few shots where it seems to have made any discernible difference.

I would probably attribute the lack of difference to the fact that, because I know how to shoot manually with an SLR and I think about light, composition, etc., when I take an iPhone shot, I’m already maxing out the light potential in the scene and positioning the camera for the best results.

The result with the iPhone is not a “bad” photo, but it will not have me abandoning my quick 3-exposure tonemapped technique any time soon. It came out very noisy, so here it is as-is (cropped to get almost the same view as the 30mm on my 50D):

iPhone HDR no post-processing

And here it is after applying Imagenomic’s Noiseware:

iPhone HDR + Imagenomic's Noiseware

More than anything, when I look at the above two photos, this seems a good sales pitch for Imagenomic’s Noiseware (which is, by the way, an excellent product)!