If you're a frequent visitor to the TravelMuse site, you may have noticed the unique look of some of our cover images. The covers for Washington, D.C., Beijing and this week's Yellowstone issue are all HDR photographs. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range, and describes the balanced exposure the pictures display, with detail in the deepest shadows and brightest highlights.

The technique is meant to replicate the range of tones our eyes are capable of seeing, which is much wider than the range our cameras capture (or our monitors display). Often, digital photographs don't resemble what our eye sees. Have you ever taken a picture of a sunset scene to later discover that the sky was way too bright, or the landscape way too dark? With HDR photography, you take multiple pictures of the same scene, at different exposures, and blend them with specialized software to create an image that’s closer to how the scene looked to you in person.

Here are a few tips for creating HDR photographs:

• Use a tripod, because if your images don't line up, the software has a harder time blending them.
• Set your camera to aperture priority or manual, so your aperture doesn't change and cause the depth of field to vary between exposures.
• Take a minimum of three exposures, with a half to full stop difference between them—but the more exposures you take, the better your final image will look.
• Experiment with the difference between your exposures. You want one image that exposes the brightest parts of your images perfectly and another image that exposes the shadows, with at least one image somewhere in between.
• Photo editing software, like Adobe Photoshop, is required to merge the images. If you don't have Photoshop, you can download Photomatix and use the free trial it offers.

Here are a few examples of the kinds of effects you can get with HDR photography:


Lifestyle 3 (in HDR) by kennymati on Flickr

garden HDR by Lampeduza on Flickr

berliner dom by extranoise on Flickr