Is "Straight Out Of Camera" A Productive Goal for Digital Photography?

Is "Straight Out Of Camera" A Productive Goal for Digital Photography?
Here's the best exposure I could get straight out of camera, so you can compare it to the three edited examples I posted yesterday.  It's as bright as I could make it before the clouds start to blow out, and I did some noise reduction.  That's it.  Digital camera sensors tend to have less dynamic range than film, so they're at a disadvantage already.  Our eyes change exposure all over a scene, then we rebuild the sense of high contrast in our brains.

Was "straight out of camera" ever really a common goal of most landscape photographers?  Film photographers manipulated the light coming in with filters, and they performed a lot of dodging and burning to manipulate the unrealistically simplified version of the scene which the camera produced.  It seems that the only other alternative would be to only shoot in well-lit, low contrast situations, and I think you'd end up with the same sorts of results people on vacation get with their unedited snapshots, with lots of blown highlights and blocked shadows.

To be sure, fixing the limitations of a camera, a digital one in particular, can be a daunting task.  Trying to come out the other end of the process with a realistic result is like walking a tightrope: it's dead easy to fall off, much more difficult to reach the other side successfully.  There's no one "right" or "best" way… often it's productive to try several different approaches and see which one works (if any).  To see a few early results on this image, go to my G+ Stream (https://plus.google.com/+JeffreySullivan/posts) and scroll down a few posts to see three different approaches I tried on this image.  None are perfect, this may never be what I'd consider a portfolio image, but those boundary cases when you might or might not be able to salvage a usable result strike me as exactly the ones worth exploring in a little more detail to improve your productivity.

You learn a lot more from your failures than you do from your successes, so attack your most intractable editing problems with enthusiasm, and celebrate the failures, because each failed attempt is getting you closer to the few most challenging moments and images which will be successfully and spectacularly saved using the skills and techniques you develop.

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