It’s a dilemma, actually, because the HDR “look” can be peculiar, artificial, even surreal. If you lived in a world where every photograph was made this way, you’d have a constant migraine. But for now, I’m a little bit addicted to HDR (see my Flickr photoset of HDR photos of New England here). And at the risk of getting you addicted, too, I want to talk this week about how the technique works, what you can do with it, and how it can help all of us question some of the conventions and expectations we’ve built up around the art of photography, and around the related art of looking at photographs.

HDR images are unusual because they don’t represent a single moment in time, like most photos, but rather are digital fusions of several images of the same scene, taken at different exposure levels. (In photography, the longer the exposure time, the more light gets captured by a camera’s film or digital sensor, and the brighter the resulting image.) To collect raw material for an HDR image, photographers generally take at least three pictures: one that’s underexposed, one that’s overexposed, and one at a normal exposure. This is called exposure bracketing.

(This is an excerpt from the November 6, 2009 edition of World Wide Wade. To continue reading, please see the full column on Xconomy.)

I was not upset about the general cloudiness, because I wanted to do some more high dynamic range (HDR) photography during the trip, and in my (limited) experience, clouds actually make HDR photos far more dramatic.

I took hundreds of shots and so far I’ve processed just over a dozen of them as tonemapped HDR images. I’m assembling the whole set of HDR photos over at Flickr, but below are a few of the more interesting ones.