I'm really interested in learning how to do this. Any photographers here familiar with it? From the looks of it, you just take 3 pictures of the same location at different times of the day and then use software to map them together. It ends up looking beautiful, here are some examples:
its not 3 different times of day its 3 back-to-back exposures. One for highlights One for shadows One for midtones doing so retains all the detail in each part, no blown highlights and no drowned out shadows. if it was at different times of the day, then the clouds would be fucked up aswell as the main light source. Just google a tutorial, peace a cake.
It's not different times of day, but different exposures. You have to take 3-5 photos each with different exposures; some over-exposed and some under-exposed. Then software will put them together for you, or you can do it manually with software I think. I love it, and have been meaning to do some, but haven't gotten around to it.
Does the camera do the under/over-exposing for you? Can any good camera do it or does it have to be a special HDR camera?
Yeah, its not different times of day. What they do is take a pic at diffent exposures. HDR is high dynamic range. One under exposure, one normal, and one over exposure. You then use photoshop or another specialty program and combine all three exposures. This allows all of the features of the photo to be expressed as one photo. Sometimes you will see pictures that look almost animated like the ones you posted. Most of the Windows Vista background are HDR. It's pretty neat stuff. I looked into a while back, but never could figure out how to actually make my camera take pics at different ranges.
Your camera needs to have either a manual option, which is hard unless you have a meter on your camera, or know enough about lighting and exposure Best bet is finding a camera with: AE (auto-exposure) bracketing and learning to use it. I use a DSLR, which most have this feature. But im sure many other regular consumer-grade/mid grade cameras have it.