High dynamic range photography merges multiple exposures into one hyper-real image, and with such amazing results it's a wonder that I haven't been exposed to it before today. I'd like to extend a thank you to the guys over at Boing Boing who just linked me into the wonderful world of HDR through this great Flickr pool. I'll spare you the boring details and allow you to read up on it yourself here.

There are some great plugins for Photoshop that helps you achieve the effect, one is Photomatix which is offered as a stand alone program and also a Photoshop CS2 plugin. A free trial is available. For those of us who can't afford to drop more money into plugins, Photoshop CS2 offers 32-bit High Dynamic Range (HDR) support. A decent tutorial is available here. However the results may be a little harder to arrive at, see the Photomatix comparison site for a comparison.

Feel free to experiment and post your image into the Flickr group, link back in the comments so we can check it out!