I took these a couple months ago here in town. This was my first HDR attempt, and I used a trial of a program to merge the images, wanted to make sure I could actually do it before shelling out the cash (aka: excuse the watermarks!).
HDR photography is effective only under certain circumstances, and when it is done right. By all means, explore it - you will discover a diverse range of effects that can result in some quite beautiful pictures - but don't overuse it. This infographic explains things rather well: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eldano/612 ... otostream/
On the pictures themselves: A common problem with most HDR photos is that if you get the blend of exposures wrong, your pictures end up looking artificial and dead. The human eye expects a range of dark and light tones, and HDR should be used to select where those tones appear; to brighten a normally dark sky in order to add more life to a landscape, or to increase the deep shade between buildings in an urban photograph. In many of these pictures, (the last two in particular), the result is uniform lighting throughout the picture, which makes them rather boring to the eye. "Benched," "Gazebo," and "Trees and Lines," are quite good. In "Benched" I would have made the house slightly brighter, "Gazebo" could use some contrast between the sky and the ground, and "Trees and Lines" should have either a darker sky, or a brighter landscape.
Keep playing with the options, and you may want to shoot in RAW instead of JPEG. It may take up more memory, but with modern SD cards that's hardly an issue.
A lie can run around the world before the truth has got its boots on. - Terry Pratchett
Si non confectus, non recifiat - If it ain't broken, don't fix it.
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