I don’t remember where I got the original link, but this picture really got me interested in HDR Photography:
Not that I’m a photographer, or have a tripod, or anything really other than a point and shoot camera, but it really intrigued me. That photo, and many others (Flickr HDR pool) show the stunning results achieved by High Dynamic Range Photography. It’s a pretty simple method, depending on your available equipment, but here’s the basic idea: take multiple photos of the same subject, all at different exposure levels, then combine them in your darkroom (digital or traditional). I’m not even going to touch the traditional method here, that’s not for me.
Photoshop CS2 and later have built in partially automated methods for merging your photos to one single picture, but I tried it, and it didn’t really do anything for me – I’m not that into tweaking various levels and whatnot. There are other apps that work with varying degrees of success, and to be honest, I didn’t even look at them. There doesn’t seem to be a real need now, as there appears to be a new, mean, powerful kid on the block. The name is Enfuse, and it started on Linux, but lives happily on OSX and Win32 also.
You can read a bit more about it and HDR basics (along with some screenshots and software/result comparisons) at this article on linux.com.
So, maybe you photo nerds will have some fun with this. Everyone else should go browse that pool, as there are some really amazing pictures.