Thanks for the feedback. In this case, it was a low end Point and Shoot. I have a bigger camera (older), with more advanced features. In retrospect, I really should have brought it along, the increased weight and bulk notwithstanding. Anyway, here is the
original image (3.5 Megs)
A quick check of the original* shows some of the snow to be saturated, but nothing else. Large portions of the sky are just below saturation. It looks like the auto-exposure did a reasonable job.
* Of course, the "original" here is a JPEG, not the RAW image so I cannot analyze the true original. Of course a significant amount of processing occurred inside the camera to make the JPEG from the internal RAW.
However, the minimum pixel value is ~30 (out of 256), giving an overall dynamic range of ~3 stops (pretty small!). Perhaps some of the shadows were filled by haze or this is a camera limit. Your post-processing expanded the dynamic range, perhaps to remove the haze but mapping some of the shadows to 0 in the process.
Another, and perhaps better, way to increase the dynamic range and shadow detail would have been to reduce the haze with a polarizing filter, had one been available.
In 20-20 hindsight, it might have been nice to have bracketed the exposure or dialed in some (-1/2 stop?) exposure compensation. If your camera can display a histogram and/or flash saturated pixels, it may be worth checking it, dialing in some compensation, and taking another shot. (Some photographers put some compensation (typ -1/2 to -1 stop) in their standard setup to minimize the risk of saturation. However, this may reduce the effective dynamic range of the camera.)
Your choice to increase the dynamic range is an artistic decision--while I might have stayed a little closer to the original density scale, the net effect of your changes makes the image a bit more dramatic than the original.
Doug