HDR is the abbreviation for high dynamic range. Sometimes known as HDRI (high dynamic range imaging), it refers to techniques that expand the range of illuminance of a standard digital camera image to more accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels in real life scenes.
Many digital cameras, even today, are incapable of capturing both the brightest and darkest areas in real life scenes accurately. Technically speaking, film has a wider dynamic range and is better at reproducing images of a scene more accurately as seen by the human eye. For this advantageous reason, many Hollywood movies are still shot on film even today.
HDR images are most commonly produced by photographing a scene with a series of images at different exposure levels; some images overexposed, some images underexposed, and an image correctly exposed. Then, using specialty HDR software, or imaging software capable of producing HDR imagery, the series of images are aligned and blended to produce a HDR image not possible to capture in a single exposure.
Since about 2 years ago, I considered doing HDR photography but never began doing it. Finally in June 2010, after acquiring a popular HDR software called PhotoMatix Pro, I began experimenting with HDR photography.
The above gallery of images contains my very first HDR images using a recently acquired second-hand Fujifilm FinePix S9500. I found and bought this old digital camera based on a false tip-off on the internet that this camera could perform infrared (IR) photography without the hot spot (flare) phenomena, and also because Fujifilm FinePix cameras can produce beautiful colours with their proprietary Fujichrome mode. Photographers who use the professional Fujifilm FinePix S2 Pro, S3 Pro and S5 Pro, or other Fujifilm FinePix cameras, would know this well.