For a long time now I have been looking at photographs online of scenes that look almost surreal, and wondering how those images were taken. After some searching around I found out that those images are High Dynamic Range images, or HDR and are actually composites of multiple pictures of the same scene. The individual images are taken at varying exposure settings and then combined to form a new composite image of the scene or item in question. This enables the images to have a much larger range for tones and colors and can produce some fantastic pictures.

Even though I knew how the procedure is accomplished I did not know enough about the manual settings on my camera to attempt to do this, that is until recently. I found an article that talked about auto exposure bracketing and how it will automatically take pictures at three separate exposure levels, thus allowing for the combination and creation of an HDR image. I looked into this and found that my Digital Rebel is capable of performing this action and so I decided to try and create some HDR images. Below are two examples of my first attempt at performing this procedure. They are both of the Ypsilanti Water Tower taken from Eastern Michigan University campus.

These are the three images I originally took:

And this is the resulting HDR image:

Here is the second set I took:

And there resulting HDR:

I am hoping to find other objects and scenes to try this out on as the weather turns nicer.

I have added the above images to a new album in the gallery, and will hopefully continue to add to it as I find more things to try and take HDR images of.