It goes back to an internal battle I have when I think film versus digital, one of those conflicts being about dynamic range.  Film certainly wins out in this realm, and in an elegant way - the same way it exposes overblown highlights.  Elegantly.  Digital on the other hand has many other advantages, but when you hit that highlight ceiling you hit it hard.  Thus, the choice to use HDR and tone mapping.

I'm not bringing up anything new here.  It's just that sure, you can exceed the dynamic range of celluloid, but in the way tone mapping is used in most cases, why would you?  Most tone mapped images I've seen have excessive edge contrast, over-saturation, and weird haloing issues to the point where it becomes a meme'd out parlor trick.

That being said, I now present to you a tone mapped image.

I don't know if I completely succeeded.  It still feels a bit weird to me, almost hyper-real, but it does leave me with a some hope that these tools are valuable and valid.