What is HDR, anyway?

Just one other thing. In Analog you also have compensating developers, which will exhaust faster in darker areas (or lighter if you think in negative), and allow for lighter areas more time to develop and show, and hence some more control of the range. Same but to less degree with stand development which uses very low dilutions of the developer, and no agitation. So dodging and burning is not the only way to achieve higher dynamic range in analog photos.

About HDR on phones, I think they are the blight of photography. No more shadows and highlights. I find they are good at capturing family moments, but not as a creative tool.

I wrote a raw processing app Filmulator that simulates stand development/compensating developers to give such an effect to digital photography.

I still use it myself but I need to redo the build system and release it with an updated LibRaw... not looking forward to that.

For analog photos the negative also has more dynamic range than your screen or photopaper without any of that. Contrast is applied in the darkroom by choice of photopaper and enlarger timing and light levels, or after scanning with contrast adjustment applied in post processing. It is really a storage medium of information more than how the final image ought to look.

Slide film has probably a third the dynamic range of negative film and is meant as the final output fit for projection to display.

> About HDR on phones, I think they are the blight of photography. No more shadows and highlights.

HDR is what enables you to capture both the darkest shadow detail and the brightest highlight detail.

With SDR, one or both are often simply just lost. It might come down to preference — if you're an "auto" shooter and like the effect of the visual information at the edges of the available dynamic range being truncated, SDR is for you.

Some people prefer to capture that detail and have the ability to decide whether and how to diminish or remove it, with commensurately more control over the artistic impact. For those folks, HDR is highly desirable.