Why "finally"? How many attempts...?
All of them!
I wanted a good night image of the building with the neon lights on, but when you expose so that the neon looks good, everything else is way too dark. By the time you adjust to make everything else visible, the neon is blown out.
HDR fixes that IF I shoot at dusk - otherwise, the black contrast of night makes the neon too bright. Dusk calms that contrast down, plus it lets you have a nicer background that shows the sky, trees, and the river.
This "photo" is actually 3 tripoded photos with shutter speeds of 0.3, 1.3, and 6.0 seconds (at f8) and taken from across the street, where I had to avoid any traces of headlights/taillights from moving cars from both directions on River St and coming off Passaic St onto River. Sometimes, there weren't 6 seconds (+ 2 more for the shake-avoiding self-timer) available in the traffic light cycle to do that, so it took a few light cycles to get the necessary 3 exposures for the one image...................and I did 5 different images, for a total of 15 exposures (actually more when a few car lights snuck in that I immediately deleted). This was the best group-of-3 image.
I found an online HDR program that I can just plug the 3 exposures into. It blends the 3 into one image and after that, a little iPhoto twiddling and,
voila - a White Manna hamburger....................shot.