A bit of HDR fun

After the conference in Sitges I went through some photos and played around a bit with some HDR trickery (High Dynamic Range). The idea is to take a photo where normally the extremes of contrast would mean that some bits were overexposed while others are underexposed. By taking several photos at different exposures and a good tripod or flat piece of ground you can take the pieces from each photo which are correctly exposed and put them together into a single shot. Actually you trick and get a program to perform such an algorithm for you. Anyway, sometimes the result is completely over the top and sometimes it's very powerful. Take a look at some of the photos from Trey Ratcliff at Stuckincustoms. Anyway, the following was taken out of my lounge window at sunset. In fact this is taken from a single RAW file which contains enough information to perform an HDRification from a single shot. Perhaps a bit too easy to call art, but fun effects nonetheless.
Click for larger versions and a couple of other attempts at HDR. (Many thanks to Trey for the tip on the above photo - it may not be quite there but it's given me some more ideas to play around with)