Experiments into HDR

While I may be late to the party, I've recently started taking another look at the whole HDR process.  I know in a lot of photography circles, the subject of HDR is a hot topic...and also that there are some really good, bad and downright awful examples of HDR out there!

My views of it have been rather mixed as I don't like the artificial look that a lot of people end up with in their images.  And then I see better images from more accomplished HDR photographers and like the extended dynamic range of their images.  Really, when it comes down to it, the best I can do is try it out for myself and if it works out, I have another style of photography to offer to people.  If it doesn't work out to my liking, I can say I gave it a try and just didn't like the outcome.

With that said, here are my first two attempts at creating HDR images.  I shot them this morning when the sunrise was underway, with my Nikon set to auto-bracket "+2, +1, 0, -1, -2" to give me a set of five images per HDR file.  Once I imported them to Lightroom I selected the five images and selected "merge to HDR in Photoshop".  As you can see, I didn't go for wild, extreme effects - instead I tried to keep it more subtle while still having the extended dynamic range in the finished images.

Now it's time to post the first two HDR images from me:

Hope you like them.  I plan on continuing my experiments in HDR photography, at least for now, to see if I like the style.