I've been wanting to try some HDR photography for a while now. For those who aren't familiar it stands for High Dynamic Range. There are lots of technical ways of looking at it, most of which I confess I don't understand, but the gist of the thing is to merge several photos with different exposures to achieve one image with detail in what would normally be dark shadows as well as blown-out highlights. You then use a tone mapping system (again, I don't understand it) to make it visible on a low dynamic range medium (like your computer screen or photo paper). To do that, you need a computer program. I heard about one called Photomatix, which is pretty spiffy. They let you download a free trial, which contains the entire program and never expires, but it does put a watermark on your image. If you want to get rid of the watermark, you just buy a code (for a seemingly reasonable $99). I haven't bought the code yet, as I just wanted to try out a few things first. Here are the two that I have done (you may need to click on the picture to see it full size).





These were taken in the Book Cliffs on Steer Ridge when I was out there for work a couple weeks ago. I think they turned out pretty well, despite not having a tripod, or really knowing what I was doing. I've got a few ideas in mind for my next trials, but I haven't had time to do them yet. And I'll definitely want to try out a few more before buying the software, but I think I could really enjoy this stuff.