Interesting in HDR

Overnight last night we had rain and freezing temperatures. This natural effect on nature can be quite interesting. The picture below is a sample of what we have outside this morning.

Next I did some close-up pictures of branches around the house. Using the crop feature of my Pentax K7 I took one of the images and cropped it down to the following image.

At first I thought that this was an interesting image. Then I wondered what the HDR filter in the camera would do with this image, so I applied it and obtained the following result.

The HDR filter seemed to provide a vibrancy that did not exist before. I did try to shoot the image in HDR originally but I need to break the tripod out for that. So I was a little lazy and chose to apply HDR after the fact. What I have learned is that I need to shoot some more HDR to see how I like it. You may want to try it also. What do you think?