there is lot's of versions of bloom, you can have that effect with a shader that take the bloomed parts then blurs it and then overlays to view. (watch metal/bright objects in r2 they are bloomed too.)
Its definitely bloom..you grab the framebuffer, process it to make everything black except the brightest parts, then blur it and additively blend over the scene.
There is no such effect as "illumination". Nor does HDR have anything to do with "far away objekts"
the parts of the image i marked also get's bloomed. The game uses simple specularity shader(probably based on specmaps) and metallik parts of the weapons/clothes get's brighter/whiter if you turn them to sun, and because they are brighter they get bloomed too.