This series of photographs and their associated histograms covers good renditions of highlight clipping, i.e. photographs in which there are regions of white pixels, but they either genuinely exist in the image as white regions, or do not directly impact the aesthetics of the image.

Histogram 1: A bright overcast sky

The image was taken on a very overcast day in Montreal. This is a good example of an image with highlight-clipping in the histogram, which is neither good nor bad. The building itself does not suffer from a lack of contrast, although the non-sky region can be enhanced slightly with no ill effects on the sky (because it is already basically white). This is a common situation in outdoor, overcast scenes. In an ideal world, more texture and contrast in the sky would be great, but in reality you have to use what nature provides.

Histogram 2: White buildings

This photograph was taken in Luzern, Switzerland. It is a well contrasted image, with a somewhat indistinct, multipeak histogram. The pixels are well distributed over the range of intensities, except for the spike at values 240-255. Here highlight clipping seems as though it has occurred because there are quite a number of white pixels in the image. However this density of white pixels comes not from anything being overblown, but rather from the white buildings in the image (of which there are many).

Fujifilm X10 (12MP): 7.1mm; f/4.5; 1/950

Histogram 3: A bit of overblown sky

This photograph was taken in Grabs, Switzerland. The histogram is a nonuniform, and basically unimodal in shape, with the exception of a huge spike in the whites causing clipping. But this is a case of the highlight clipping not really affecting the core content of the image, i.e. it comprises the overblown sky in the top-left of the image. On a bright, partially overcast day, this is not an unusual scenario.

Fujifilm X10 (12MP): 7.1mm; f/2; 1/900