Hey Everybody - I wanted to share my first HDR picture I've made and how I did it

I shoot with a Canon T3i - which does not have Auto Exposure Bracketing (AEB) - which basically automatically takes more than one picture at different exposure levels. with those different images we can merge them together and pull more detail from dark areas and also pull more detail from washed out areas - which would be impossible with a single exposure image

What we can do with the Canon (which does not have AEB) is use another great feature of the camera and that's to shoot in RAW format. Most cameras save their image in a JPG, which is a compressed format and so looses a lot of detail - we may not notice the detail that's lost, but it is lost... The RAW format is just what it says - a raw capture of the scene, no compression, no nothing - just raw....

with all that extra detail - we can use a program called "Camera RAW" (there's others too) and basically adjust the exposure and save out our bracketed photos

so for this example I took a RAW picture and saved out an image at 0, +2, +4, -2, and -4 exposures then loaded them into the magical program called Photomatix - this is the program that merges the different exposures together - then inside of Photomatix you have a bazillion options to make you final picture exactly how you want it

without further ado - here are the original picture (saved as a JPG from the camera) and then the HDR that I created from the RAW image