What attracted me:
I loved the side lighting of this shot. I wanted to include the tree on the left and balance that with the fire ring on the right. And it was important to show the long shadows of the trees. And have lots of green showing along the sides. The contrast was pretty high so I knew I had to shoot multiple exposures to get what my eye saw.

Photographic Considerations:
I knew that I had a high contrast scene so shot multiple exposures. I brought the three exposures into Photomatix and used settings that were more realistic than saturated amongst the many pre-sets that were available. Then I turned down the preset that I chose a bit. I wanted the image to look natural rather than a more extreme rendering in HDR software.