HDR – High Dynamic Range Photography

What about HDR?  At first, I thought it won’t work for me…I tend to be to “pure” and really never manipulate any of the images I shoot, heck I don’t even crop…what I shot is what you see.  But after several weeks of looking at HDR images on the internet and talking with a buddy who was regularly shooting HDR, I decided that it isn’t necessarily manipulating an image (ie…combining two images) as much as it is a digital darkroom.  I started my career in a black and white darkroom where I would dodge and burn to bring out as much as I could in an image and isn’t that similar to HDR?  Now I can increase the number of stops and most of the time output what I was actually seeing in the field.  I don’t think I’ll use it to much but it will have a place in my arsenal of tools. I have also found it to be very useful when I have commercial shoots in situations where I can not control all of the light like this image of the Patagonia store front in downtown Denver.  The image was taken in the morning when the buildling and storefront were in the shade and didn’t really have any punch.  After shooting several images to take advantage of the different exposure gradients I believe I ended up with a very usable image.