An Experiment in HDR

I've mixed feelings about HDR; here are a couple of shots I took with two different schools of approach to this oft-maligned technique.

The former is high global contrast with a large radius...there are light and dark "halos" around areas of differing range. The latter is low global contrast, regular local contrast. I think the latter is the most naturalistic and preserves the most detail, whereas the first one feels like a more pronounced effect.

My concerns with HDR revolve around how it deals with information; sometimes you want as much information in the frame as possible, and sometimes it's about the artful destruction of information, causing the eye to fill in the gaps.