The best way of choosing a high dynamic scene is to start with shooting a sunset or sunrise where you have a lot of back lighting. When you are shooting HDR images, choose a scene with high dynamic range between the highlights shadows and the mid tones. So we will take these images that I have shown above, merge them all together and create this image. What we will do here is take multiple images of the same scene at different exposure levels, choose the best exposed areas of all the images and merge them to create one image, adjust the exposure, highlights, shadows and mid-tones of the image such that they are all properly exposed. HDR photography is all about overcoming this draw back and bringing out images the way you actually see with your eyes with all the areas of the image the highlights, shadows and mid-tones, properly exposed. This is a limitation in DSLRs when it comes to handling high dynamic range. +2 is exposing the shadowed regions quite well but the sky is totally blown out now. The one at zero is quite ok but the sky has lost details. The -2 has good detail on the sky and the sun but the buildings have all gone dark. There is no one exposure at which the camera can get all the details exposed right. If you increase the exposure to get the mid-tones and the shadows right, the highlights will be blown out. If you reduce the exposure to get the highlights right, the shadows will go too dark. A camera can only see one exposure level at a time. This is because in this scene there is a huge difference of exposure between the highlights, mid-tones and the shadows. What you see on your camera is just not the same as what you were able to see with your eyes. So you take your camera out and take a picture, but the camera is not giving you the picture that you expected. You have the sun, the beautiful clouds, trees, a river flowing, birds flying around and its paradise. Let’s say there is a nice sunset landscape scenery that you are looking at. High Dynamic Range photography is, well, there are lot of technical reasons and explanation about this method but personally, I feel HDR is the process of making landscape shots more awesome-er.

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