Greg, you have it backwards.
The second photo is what the day looked like. No photographic film or digital sensor is as good as the human eye at seeing both highlights and shadows. A digital camera normally shoots RAW format (Nikon calls them NEF) or TIFF format. When you look at the original file, you are seeing a JPEG display embedded n the RAW file. It is unprocessed. Think of it as negative that has not been printed in the darkroom. When I attended Ansel Adams Carmel workshop. He used one of his famous photos titled "Moonrise over Hernandez, NM". He first made a straight print from the negative with no dodging, burning, etc. It looked a lot like my first unprocessed photo. The prints that were published in books and posters and sold as collector prints required a lot of work in the darkroom. Ansel told us that he sometimes made 25 prints before he was satisfied. He used traditional dodging and burning techniques and even used bleach on dark areas of the print.
I am sure you do not use the raw footage you get for you DVDS. The video editing software has similar controls to darken or lighten the images. Some critics call this image manipulation. Manipulation is when you move a Egyptian pyramid as a National Geographic photographer did years ago (he was fired). Dodging, burning, adjusting exposure adjusting contrast, changing white balance is not manipulation, is simply use the original file as a negative to produce a better (print). Those who do no image editing of their files are leaving it to the camera manufacturer defaults which were designed primarily to get the best exposure of the human face. I worked at Hewlett-Packard on HP Scanjet scanners for 11 years and some of my engineer friends were on the industry committees that developed the TIFF and JPEG formats, I learned a lot from them. People say there is no difference between cameras....a NIKON is the same as a CANON as a PENTAX. While the physical appearance is similar, the way the electronics in the camera processes the raw data is different. The engineers at these companies have different ideas of what makes a good image.
The technology continues to improve. The dynamic range is critical element in photography that is often ignored or not understood. It is part of the camera resolution. Most of the time a modern camera can capture an image in good lighting that is sufficient for most people. I think editing or post processing will always be necessary to get the best possible results as image quality is a personal thing. What I like may not be what you like.
