Nighttime HDR - House 1

@Maxine: Thanks, Maxine. I doubt the people even knew I was outside...

@Linerberry: It does have that kind of look to it, even though I took this image a few months ago!

Thanks fr the compliment, Caroline!

@Earnest: Thanks for the fantastic compliment and vote of confidence, but I think you might be better served by watchiing someone that actually knows what they're doing! LOL

HDR images do seem to have a surreal look to them from they way they equalize the huge contrast variations in a scene. We're not used to seeing that in a single exposure photo, and we usually don't realize what a huge contrast range our eyes can actually see in a scene.

@Eleftheria!: Thank you, Eleftheria!

@Mary: Thank you very much, Mary! I like the way this one turned out better then the other one. Now I'm going to go out and see if I can get some decent photos of Christmas lights.

@PD: Thanks, PD! I was a bit surprised by the star trails; I didn't imagine that they would be visible in frames taken in less than a 2 minute time span.

This photo was made from 4 exposures, although I probably shot six or seven. I don't really calculate what I need in terms of number and space of exposures, I do a lot of it just by sight and experience. (I have a TON of HDRs that I wound up deleting, but they were great for learning. LOL) I try to take two exposures over what the camera tells me is normal, and 3-5 under, plus the normalized exposure. I like to go with extra under-exposed images to get things like cloud details to pop out. Once I get them into the computer, I can get a better idea if the exposure is actually going to add any necessary information into the image and then go from there. Most of the time I use five exposures for my HDR images, but sometimes I'll have to drop one depending on how it looks after Photomatix does it's magic. For me, doing these HDR photos is a lot like playing and composing jazz. I learned all of the classical theory when I was a vocal major, and then threw it all out the window when I started playing jazz guitar! I just play around with an image until I like the way it looks, and Adobe Lightroom is a great instrument that I've developed some neat trick with for doing just that.

Thanks again for the great compliment and question, PD!

@Alphons: Thank you very much, Alphons!

@JJ: Thank you very much, JJ!