I'm typically "stuck" with my iPhone as my only camera when I'm out hiking. Partly because I'm already using it for a few other things (reading, marking gps waypoints, etc.) and I suppose partly because I think having constraints is good for creativity. One of the big constraints I find is being able to shoot vistas without blowing out highlights or shadows.
What I've been doing to get around this is using the "touch to expose" feature in the iPhone to take a couple shots of the scene at various points from way underexposed to way overexposed and then going into photoshop and combining them all in HDR. Essentially this merges the information captured in all of the images into a single image so you have a more complete range from dark to light. Here's one I took the other day:
Personally, I've been pretty happy with the results. When processing it you can push it a bit more to the surreal side (which I personally like) or keep it more photorealistic. If you don't have photoshop there are a couple apps in the App Store that will do the processing for you (be sure and get one that's actually combining multiple photos and not just doing the tone mapping part of the process – essentially just a filter).
Anyway, just thought I'd mention it in case anyone else is working to get the most out of their camera on the trail.
