Photo by: Browni_Dot_Com.

This is another picture from the Flickr archives, about a year old. It is so cool… and a great example of HDR (high dynamic range). Notice how the sky is really well exposed and saturated, but the horse is equally well exposed? If you took a simple available light shot… that wouldn’t happen. There are two ways to achieve that – lights (which would require a lot of light to make the horse look that good) or HDR (a Photoshop technique that blends different exposures of the same image to help bring out shadows and highlights).

The problem? It’s clearly a very sunny day. If you stopped your camera down to expose the sky, the horse would be a dull shadow. If, on the other hand, you expose the horse well with the nice highlights and the shadowing underneath, the sky will probably be quite blown out. Solution? You bracket the exposure and blend the stuff in photoshop later on. Cool.