No, that's neither quite right nor fair.
There certainly is a thing called proper exposure. And it depends entirely upon the job you're trying to do.
I shot Kodachrome professionally for many, many years, and it suited my work perfectly, not only due to its colour plan, but to another vital property: it travelled much better than any other colour film I ever tried out. As long as I kept it in a cooler bag, out of direct sunlight, it didn't really requĦre processing all that soon after exposure; two or three weeks on location wasn't a problem.
Yes, it didn't have as wide a DR as digital seems to have, but even digital's DR isn't infinite, so one's just talking about relativities here - not perfection. One worked within the parameters of the material, and if anything, the way that tones were recorded or lost was a contributing factor to the look one could get, how shadows would look relative to highlights. Hell, if everything's recorded equally well, then how flat it all gets to seem. So this thing about huge DR's a bit of a manufacturer's game, a selling point that may actually be counterproductive: have you never seen anybody complain here about a subject looking too HDR'd?
As I indicated, it all comes down to how well you know your materials and what you have or want to do. Were that not so, there would have been no marvellous photography pre-digital, which is patently nonsense, and I suggest much of it was "better" than what goes down today.
Rob
You didn't answer the question.
What is your definition of 'proper exposure' when the DR in the scene exceeds the DR of your recording medium?
Do you expose for the highlights and leave the shadows as detailless, black blobs? Or do you expose for the shadows, blowing the highlights? Do you split the difference and aim for the midtones, blowing smaller areas of both highlights and shadows? Or do you just walk away and not shoot at all?
A common enough scenario in landscape photography, and one that can't always be solved by filters (uneven horizons and increased vignetting) or HDR (movement).
As for badly-tonemapped images with too much midtone compression, that has nothing to do with HDR, or even dynamic range, and everything to do with bad tonemapping. I could make a single exposure with 3 stops of DR look like that if I wanted to. In fact, most photos would somewhat look like that with a linear response curve.
Every digital image needs to be tonemapped. You don't normally have to think about it because the RAW converter does it automatically, and you don't normally get midtone-compressed images because most converters apply pretty good tonemapping curves. People run into trouble when merging HDR files because they then have to create a curve manually and actually think about the structure of the curve and where their highlights, midtones and shadows are, instead of just applying an automatic setting. Done properly, an HDR image looks no different from a distance than a non-HDR image, except, once you get closer, you can see that the shadows aren't just featureless blobs of black, but areas with as much detail and texture as the rest of the image.
I could easily put up a number of HDR and non-HDR images here and you'd never know which one was which.
