One fine evening (some 9 months ago) I wake up in the evening (Yes, I do that) and what I see from my balcony is a beautiful scene created by mother nature. Immediately thought came in mind to capture it forever. But the moment I click, I don’t see the same beauty on the LCD panel of my not-so-expensive camera. If I try to capture the details in the sky, I miss out the details on earth and vice versa.
Then comes the thought to try something different, which I haven’t tried myself before. Set the camera to exposure bracketing mode to take three different shots at different exposures (-2, 0, +2 in my case) and click click click. I get three different images with different exposures.
I transfer the images to my Mac and use Photomatix to bind them one over another. Photomatix does a great job (after some tweaking here and there) and it gives me this wonderful image which exactly looked like the scene outside. Bingo. I like the natural looking image I got. I have seen some overly processed HDRs which look like some abstract art. Here my motive was to get the image which looks as real as possible and to my surprise, I did succeed to most extent.

The original images used to create this HDR can be viewed here.
Here is one more attempt at HDR. The image below was created by binding two separate images, which were not shot keeping HDR in mind (didn’t use exposure bracketing for these).
If you want to read further on HDR, there is a good Wikipedia article you can read here.
Amzing shots!!
These are good first HDRs. I have only done a handful myself in the last year, mostly with Photomatix; they can be a lot of fun:
http://stephenandjessica.proberts.com/wordpress/tag/hdr/
Awesome effort there. Particularly like number 1, has a very natural feel to it which is difficult to achieve with HDR often.
Very nice, great use of HDR and keeping a natural look. I’m also using HDR and I quite like it, but requires some getting used to. Maybe that’s just getting used to photography.
http://martinsoler.wordpress.com/category/hdr/
Thanks martinsoler for visiting my post. You have a great set of HDRs there. I have a long way to go yet. Do you mind sharing more info about what techniques do you use? I mean, what tool do you use? How do you shoot the photos in first place?