High Dymanic Range Photography

Cambridge Photography Gallery

The link above is to good examples of high dynamic range (HDR) photos. HDR is a way of packing in more dynamic range (darkness and lightness) into a picture. Adobe Photoshop accomplishes this by merging multiple picutres together. Each picture (of the same scene, almost always taken from a tripod) is taken using different exposures. Three or more images are then merged to together to make the final image.

The result is impressive. The images almost look unreal, like high quality computer graphics usually seen in video games.

This landscape site has a nice description of HDR and walks you through it in Photoshop.

Flickr has pool HDR images. You can see more examples of good (and quite a few bad) HDR images.

-- Chris