Quote Originally Posted by quickdodge®
Is it kind of the same thing? I don't know, it just looks real clear. What is the purpose of his pictures? What has he done to make them stand-out? Not dissing, just don't know photography to know what's so special about the pics. Later, QD.
They may be able to explain it better than I, since I've never hands-on tried it myself but......

HDR photography is a technique that is used to make a pic have infinitely more depth than a single pic could under certain situations.

Our eyes can adjust and see so much quicker than any camera lens ever could. As such, when you look at something you can differentiate between darks and lights and bright and shadows all in the same pic. In other words, we can see all the differences, especially small ones, in the entire picture. We see things even if they fall into the shadows, where a camera would blend it INTO the shadow. Follow?

If you look at Jorge's pic, the sky in the background is clear and crisp as it would be seen with your eyes that particular day. The only way to capture that vividly is to speed up the shutter. Problem is that if he did that, he would leave the foreground shadows too dark. The way to fix that is to either have fill lights all over the parking lot in the foreground when he took the pic or to use HDR to get everybody on the same page. He takes a series of pics which range from dark to light and he uses the correct exposure for both the foreground and the background into 1 final HDR pic. This is also sometimes called "toned mapping".

Even some lower end cameras have a feature called "bracketed exposure". This basically does what Jorge showed up there when he showed the series of pics from light to dark. Your camera would take 3 pics basically. 1 dark, one in the middle, 1 slightly over exposed. You would then choose the better one out of the three. Some cameras let you choose 1 stop, 2 stops, and even 3 stop increments.

I hope I explained it correctly and not too confusing. Basically in layman's terms a HDR pic shows details much more lifelike than can be achieved with single shots because you add 3D like depth to the shot.