Enough is enough, the points have all been made.

Excellent set of images, just the right sort of subject for the technique. A lesson in how to get it right!

I'm sure it doesn't, nor does EPZ, and I understand the reason has to do with bandwidth issues.

If you want to hotlink to images you need a hosting site such as Photobucket.

I agree with what you have both said. I'll keep on having a go at HDR for a while, but, with the exception of maybe some special effects, I have a feeling that as a technique it will be a dead-end.

The original is far more realistic to the actual scene as it was. This was late evening light, in fact just five minutes of sun in an otherwise totally grey and overcast day.

Somebody was smiling down on us on that cold Friday evening, perhaps Edward FitzGerald himself...

The original version:
[IMG]http://i240.photobucket.com/albums/ff250/johnriley1uk/020-Boulge-Church-800-1.jpg[/IMG]

The JPEG compression essentially takes similar areas of the image and remembers them once instead of multiple times. An over-simplification, but it means that an image that might be 18MB of space when opened could be as little as 2-4MB when compressed. When the file is opened it is reconstructed from the compressed state, and of course approximations and assumptions are made in this reconstruction. This is a lossy format, but good enough for most purposes.

Now the original (compressed) file can vary in size and that's because it could vary from a picture of a grey wall (lots of similar areas, huge compression possible) to a picture of a detailed map (lots of detail that has to be recorded).

If you look at your images there will be variations that account for the difference in file sizes.

Well we could snipe at each other or we could talk about photography. The latter is encouraged!

Here's another go, this time from one image processed several times to produce different "exposures" and with a bit more respect for reality:
[IMG]http://i240.photobucket.com/albums/ff250/johnriley1uk/006-Boulge-HDR.jpg[/IMG]
Boulge Church, Near Woodbridge, Suffolk

Double posting is discouraged because it causes confusion as to which thread to reply in and it clutters the forum.

I'll lock this thread now so you can take replies in the appropriate section.