“HDR is just a standard. HDR doesn’t have any creative implication or aesthetic implication. It’s just a standard.”
Cullen Kelly
Kelly used to be one of the most perceptive commentators on HDR, but ever since meeting Steve Yedlin, he’s like a completely different person. In his most recent live stream, he says,
“The first thing you need to ask, the most important question, the biggest question that you’re going to need to answer when you’re talking about getting into an HDR workflow, is how different from your SDR do you want your HDR to be.”
“The best way to start your journey into HDR is to ask the question, what do you want that isn’t [SDR]? What do you want above that? You’re in HDR, so you can do things above that; you can get a larger color volume, you can get more dynamic range. The question is, how much of that do you want; how different from your SDR do you want it to be? You’ll encounter different filmmakers with wildly different viewpoints on this. There are some filmmakers out there who are like, ‘I want all thousand nits and I want every square inch of that P3.’ There are other filmmakers who are like, ‘How much of that do I want? Zero. I want exactly what I saw in Rec.709 gamma 2.4 100 nits in HDR.’ So, if you ask me to do an HDR deliverable, it’s going to look identical to the SDR deliverable. I’m just giving it to you in HDR because you asked for it.”
This is the same person who once wrote:
“With today’s rapid pace of technological evolution, it can be difficult to identify which advances are here to stay, and which are simply fleeting trends. Nowhere is this more true than with displays. In the last ten years, we’ve watched gimmicks including 3D, HFR (High Frame Rate), and the mindless grab for ever-greater Ks dominate our horizons, only to quietly fade away. But if there’s one advance in display technology that’s here to stay, it’s HDR (High Dynamic Range). Content mastered for HDR displays may still be in a minority today, but this is certain to continue its rapid shift in the coming years. Soon it will be the rule rather than the exception.
How can we be so sure of this?
Perhaps it’s because the move to HDR is as significant as any shift in the history of motion imaging. And that includes evolutions such as the shift from 18 frames per second to 24, black and white to color, and standard definition to high definition.
Technical details aside, the most important thing to understand about HDR is that it doesn’t represent an enhancement as much as the removal of an artificial limitation. In the realm of human vision and physical light, high dynamic range is a default condition, not an added gimmick.”
And this:
“With the evolution of technologies like HDR, VR, and volumetric video, images are being released from their dim two-dimensional cages, creating new challenges and opportunities for the way we engage and guide the viewer’s eye. This is completely uncharted territory, and navigating it will require new ideas and new tools. The current playbook for capturing and mastering compelling images is going to become increasingly irrelevant, leaving those of us who are up to the task to write a new one.”
The Daejeon Chronicles 
Great points
Which points??
Yes, Cullen seems to have had a change of mind…actually, in several areas.
Also, find it rather curious the disparate views of the nature of HDR. It’s quite a flexible format, time will tell where it falls out. I submit Cullen’s persoective is tied to celluloid characteristics. Digital HDR is changing the paradigm away from those qualities, particularly in a marketplace where new viewers didn’t grow up with celluloid.
On one of his live streams, Kelly had this to say about film vs digital, “I think the most creatively beneficial thing that we can do is to zoom out a little bit and say, ‘Okay, I’m going to creatively, subjectively borrow the pieces that I find most creatively advantageous,’ as opposed to perpetually looking in the rear view mirror and saying, ‘Well we’ve peaked, nothing’s ever going to look better than film and now all we can do is the extent to which our images look good is the extent to which we are able to one-to-one reproduce the results that we would get from a system that is dead or dying.’ I think that’s a pretty depressing thought and I think we can do better and there’s all kinds of stuff that come with film systems that are not desirable. The variability that I just talked about – that’s not desirable. Who wants, who among us would sign off on ‘How would you like to have a system that gives you one result on one run of negative and print and a different result the next day?’ That’s not optimal, that’s not ideal, that’s just unavoidable with a film system. Another one is that we started the conversation with like, well film prints, there’s no such thing as an HDR film print. Film prints max out at an absolute peak of about 48 nits. What if I want something brighter that still looks good? Am I just out of luck because all I can do is grope at this system that hasn’t evolved past that in a number of years? There’s all kinds of undesirable aspects of film as well, and I think the only way we can borrow the best of the film tradition is to recognize it’s not perfect, it’s just the results of about a century of really smart people working really hard to make images look really good and if we steal the best parts of that tradition and leave behind the parts that they weren’t able to push further…”
This is the curse of creatives, working to the lowest common denominator to ensure widest compatibility.