What is it about heavily-processed, unrealistic and over-saturated images that I like so much? I don’t know but I think that the explosion in HDR images on photo sharing sites like Flickr and others is a good indication that I am not the only one. What is HDR? It stands for High Dynamic Range and it is a term that describes a method of combining multiple photos (typically an image that has well exposed shadow detail another image that has well exposed highlights and somewhere between none and as many as you want in between). The purpose of combining those different exposures is to get the entire image properly exposed. Have you ever seen a photo like this:

The clouds look cool but the ground and everything else is underexposed. You could fiddle around in Photoshop…dodge, burn, levels, curves, all that jazz. Or you could bracket your shot and merge the exposures to get something like this:

I think it makes for a pretty nice effect. However, there are certainly those who like their ranges nice and low with no dynamic-ness. Yes, I made that up. What I meant to say is there are so-called purists who think that somehow making HDR images is like cheating on an exam or something. For example, a fine upstanding photographer by the name of Trey Ratcliff blogged about his finalist entry in the Smithsonian Magazine Photo Contest. This was his contest submission:

Read all about it on Trey’s blog, Stuck in Customs. By the way, if you ever want to learn anything about creating your own High Dynamic Range images, Trey can hook you up, he pretty much wrote the book.