Learning Something New - HDR

Galveston Island State Park

Although I realize most of the time I am behind the rest of the world in learning new techniques - I am really enjoying this approach to photography imaging - HDR (high dynamic range) that fuses 3 photos together (1 underexposed, 1 balanced, 1 over exposed) so that the final output includes all the colors, tones, etc that is possible.  I've seen photos like this circulating around, but didn't know how to get that look.  This seems to be especially effective in lower light. 

The above picture was taken at Galveston Island State Park, Texas, in the middle of the afternoon (I know very bad time for taking pictures), but I wanted a few very quick pics to play with.  I needed to do some research to figure out how to set my camera for bracketing and also quickly found out I would have to shoot in a manual mode (aperature priority) - not my favorite thing to do - but this will force me to get better.  I used 3 stops up/down and fused 3 pictures together using HDR software (Photomatix Essentials).  I didn't crop this - this is how it came out of the camera.  Once in the HDR software I applied the "painterly" tone mapping.  There are other choices & you can preview before you save the fused file/picture. 

Here are some details of what I did/used to get this picture.  Keep in mind that I've reduced the file size of this picture for the web - way down.

Camera - Nikon D90
polarizer filter on (for color saturation & glare)
bracketing set for F3 (3 stops +/- around the balanced photo
aperature priority (F4.5)
auto focusing

Here's another photo of a gull that I applied the deep tone map affect - wish our water in this area was that nice blue (it is usually kind of muddy), but it makes for a nice picture.  Same camera, aperature priority, auto focus, with polarizing filter (because yes I was taking pictures in the middle of the day).  This picture has been cropped. I really like the sharp/bright colors of the granite/rock he is standing on as well. 

Gull at Texas City Dike, Texas