I want to make a shout out to local pro photographer Carlos Austin who turned me on to another amazing sensation in photography — High Dynamic Range imagery.

The concept is pretty easy. Often when we take a picture, we sacrifice something. To get faces to be well exposed, the sky is blown out white. Or to get the pretty blue horizon, other things are in silhouette. Statues are especially difficult to capture.

During my Photography Walking Tour of UT Class on Saturday (what fun students–one of my best classes of all time!), I got a chance to take a few shots myself, specifically over and underexposing my images so that I could test them out with Photomatix, software designed especially to combine your images to get the best exposure from each.

Here are the three shots I took of a statue on the South Mall.

And here is the resulting combined HDR image. What a difference!

Download the software and try it yourself. The trial version is free.