I get a lot of emails asking me about how I do my HDR shots.
Well firstly, I do not do HDR all that much anymore. Many people process every single shot they take with Photomatix.
Most of the time you can smell a HDR from a mile away, they look too artificial. Also it does not work with just any kind of photo.
You really do need a dynamic range that is above what the camera can capture in order to make a HDR image work.
Also use subtle settings if you use Photomatix (the best software for HDR).
The below image was a HDR vertorama (3 shots for the ground, 3 shots for the sky). First I created one HDR image of the 3 ground images, then a HDR from the 3 sky shots. I then went into photoshop to stitch the resulting two images.
The reason I used HDR here (-1, 0, +1 EV) is because no matter what I did, one thing was always over- or underexposed. Either foreground or the sky.
Jardin du Luxembourg
