This is from my first "big" hospitality shoot. It may or may not look like it, but the buffet was actually open to guests at the time of the shoot, so I had to be quick - waiting for guests to get their food, cleaning up whatever they misplaced and taking my shots.
At the moment, I'm getting by with a mixture of HDR and compositing of bracketed exposures, followed by post-processing in Photoshop.
I start out shooting RAW in 5 bracketed exposures, and open them up using Adobe Camera RAW to adjust and convert to jpeg. The jpegs get thrown into Photomatix Pro so I have a decently exposed and balanced file to work off of in Photoshop. I then use the original jpeg files and layer mask in any areas that are still out of balance - most of the time, windows and low lit background. From there, it's just curve adjustments, local color balancing, and cloning out unwanted artifacts.
